Man Made God in Man's Image

There are many reports dealing with Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) fixation on his White-Supremacy-Evangelical-Protestant morons connected to America 250. Here's one from the usual suspect.

Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, said in a recent interview that language describing America as a Christian nation "can be destructive," especially when it's used to center culture around the exclusion of certain groups.

Some 80 years ago, Catholics were routinely excluded in American public life, he said.

"They wouldn't say, this is a Christian nation, they'd say, it is a Protestant nation," he said.

And, for the record, this is the relevant bit of the 1^st

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

We ain't just Puritans.

Roger Williams was kicked out of Massachusetts even before there was a USofA.

Initially a Puritan minister, his beliefs evolved and he questioned the authority of the Puritan church in enforcing religious conformity. He was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he established Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he termed "liberty of conscience" making Rhode Island the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding charter.

Jews attempting to escape Nazis were barred from coming to America, fur instance.

And so on.

Ya cain't have all them dirty Irish and German and Italian folk "poisoning the blood of our country" during the 19^th century, and even the earliest part of the 20^th. As Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) says it.

"No Irish need apply." A history. It wasn't just the jingoists of the 19^th century

The 1924 National Origins Quota Act (known as the Johnson-Reed Act) establishes that quotas will be calculated based on 2 percent of each nationality's proportion of the foreign-born US population in 1890, as indicated in the 1890 census. The use of the 1890 census to set the quotas is criticized as discriminating against southern and eastern Europeans, who arrived in the United States in greater numbers during the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. Students, nationals of Western Hemisphere countries, members of certain professions, and the wives and minor children of US citizens are exempted from the quotas.

The Dark Ages were impelled by religious zealotry. It's gonna be a rough ride. Tom Lehrer gets it on the nose, yet again.

Stupid is as Stupid Does - part the seventh

Well... yet another example of Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson proving him quite right.

While Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson keeps filling the coffers of the fossil fuel companies (Shell, and one suspects the rest, reported huge windfall profits), most every other country is developing electrified transport systems. How much of petro in the USofA is devoted to transport, you might ask? Well, it's 70% and a good part of that is tied up in the Persian Gulf, thanks to Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson.

At a time when oil and gas supply is faltering, the cost of wind and solar energy keeps declining. And, when paired with battery systems for storage, renewables can often provide steady electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, even when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow.

Of course, it's not all bunnies and roses. To signficantly transition to wee little electrons moving stuff, there needs to be infrastructure that can run on wee little electrons. Most of the rest of the world kept, and expanded, their rail systems post-WWII, while the USofA went all in on cars and trucks. It may be that battery powered cars and trucks can exploit those wee little electrons rather than directly with trams and trains. We'll see. One hopes.

Gaslight

Since AI, as currently implemented, isn't very secure by nature; hallucinations and fake data and so on, it would be a Good Idea to vet such systems. Today's report has it that Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) intends to "vet" AI models. After Anthropic announced that its still (for some definition of 'still') hidden from public view Mythos model can break virtually all of computerdom, Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) and his merry band of psycopaths clearly began to see visions of Absolute Power Over Everything.

Mythos is so powerful at identifying security vulnerabilities in software that it could lead to a cybersecurity "reckoning," said Anthropic, which declined to release the model to the public.

Do you really, really believe that Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) our Grifter In Chief would ever, in a million years, let anyone stop him and his merry band of psycopaths from using it to subjugate The Rest of Us??? MTG, evil apostate that she is, would likely be on the New Shortlist of Those to be Deleted.

The administration is also evaluating whether new A.I. models could yield cyber-capabilities that could be useful to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, they said.

So, there it is: the evil bit said out loud.

By The Numbers - part the ninety ninth

Farmers have been getting the Cadillac treatment pretty much forever. Even though non-urban population is down to 20% in this here The United States of Alabama. One of the ways is money and data support from Uncle Sugar. The Farm Bill has been mentioned here at least a few times. This recent report describes, mostly, farmers reliance on USDA data collection and reporting to run their farms. Quite a boon. But, according to the report, the last corn crop total acreage report was off by, it is believed, 5%.

Of course, the Batshit J. Moron and his merry band of acolytes don't assess that the miss report is due to the draconian slashing of employment at USDA; of course not

The Agriculture Department lost 23,000 employees in 2025, as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency slashed jobs across the federal government. The National Agricultural Statistics Service, which produces crop reports, was one of the hardest-hit divisions; it lost 34 percent of its staff, going to about 500 employees from around 800.

The guy in charge puts the blame on lowering survey response rates

For years, the department has struggled with fewer farmers returning its surveys, one of the key data sources for crop production reports. The response rate for recent surveys was around 40 percent, according to the department, down from around 60 percent a decade ago.

What's funny about such an excuse? When you watch (or read) your fave news source, you'll get survey results on Batshit J. Moron's approval rate for various actions or his overall approval/disapprovel and the like or Americans view of abortion or immigration and the like. If you look at the fine print at the end of the report you'll see two numbers (approx. values) the sample size, generally around 2,500 (sometimes smaller), and the margin of error of the percent(s), generally around 3.4%. For 349,000,000 Americans. Now, the number of voters is about 174,000,000 in 2024.

Now, the whole point of the crop reports is to support gaming the market by commodities traders and farmers. One wants the lowest price, the other the highest. But

Farmers have a deep and direct relationship with the federal government, which sustains much of their business. Farmers participate in crop insurance and conservation programs, apply for grants and receive disaster assistance and ad hoc payments. The Agriculture Department projects that government payments will account for 29 percent of farm income this year.

Welfare kings. The tail is wagging the dog.

Feets, Don't Fail Me Now - part the third

Yet another series is established. There've been occasional reports about the foreigners' reaction to Emporer Nero The Donald's Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte jingoist vetting of them come visa time. As one might expect, more and more are saying, "thanks, but no thanks". And, even less surprising, Batshit J. Moron and his merry band of idiots has set its sights on the science minded. Fresh off the presses is what's happening in the healthcare side of life. Paywalled, per usual, but the lede is open.

New and intrusive burdens for renewing a component of her visa — which required her to make public her social media profiles for U.S. review while she was back in India — caused her to be away from the lab for two months during the crunch time of wrapping up her degree.

We can't have yet more aliens invading, especially ones that refuse to suck Batshit J. Moron's tiny dick.

An open report says the same, with more detail than the STAT lede

The Trump administration's deep cuts to federal funding of scientific research, crackdown on universities, and proposals aimed at deterring international talent have unleashed a loss of scientific talent - a brain drain - away from the United States to other countries.

This is what happens when Emporer Nero The Donald Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who wasn't bright enough to get into the Ivy League without some post-sophomore (which means, "wise fool" btw) help. And the program he ran was nothing but EasyA courses in Real Estate Economics (no longer an Econ curriculum, of course). Of course. If you want The United States of Alabama to be just like the antebellum version? "First thing we do is kill all the smart people".

Side Eye For The White Guy

In the news today:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is poised to file a civil rights lawsuit against The New York Times, centered on the allegations of a white male employee who did not get a sought-after promotion and argued it was because of his race and gender, two people familiar with the matter said.

Come on man!! Ever body knows that pencil neck rednecks are smarter than the smartest split bottom or negro!! They tell us that at ever Klan meeting. We gotta get back to the Real United States of Alabama, like before the War of Northern Aggression. White Pride World Wide. And, no, I didn't make that up in a fit of sarcasm.

Power To The People

So, here's some numbers wrt The Musk Ox's Pipe Dream.

The largest solar array in space serves the International Space Station. It generates ~215 kilowatts.

Here's the power needed for a contemporary data center:

A single AI server rack requires 50-150 kilowatts compared to 10-15 kilowatts for conventional computing, driven primarily by dense GPU clusters that operate continuously at maximum capacity.

And, remember: that's per rack!! Cookie monster. One rack eats most (more recent estimates bump that power demand higher) of the largest orbiting array power in existence.

Now, what's the average data center count of racks? According to Google, it depends

1 MW About 1,000 - 2,000 rack servers
10 MW About 10,000 - 20,000 rack servers
50+ MW Up to 100,000+ rack servers

Back of the envelope? 1 MW is 4 times what the ISS has, and that's not continuous power, since Mother Earth gets in the way for a significant slice of the orbit. So, LEO or geosync? The latter allows for continuous contact with Mr Sun, likely never to be feasible not to mention cost effective. LEO can be gotten to, but building such big structures there? Not my kettle of fish.

Doesn't sound all that practical. By no means obvious. Well... if you want to depreciate, at Uncle Sugar's expense, all those 'reusable' rockets it might be!!!

Just found this piece on the feasibility of space-based solar power. Now, the author's point of view is harvesting wee little electrons from space-based solar panels and sending, sort of, them back to ground stations to be enjected into the grid. So, some of his math relates to transmission losses and the like. For such electric generation to be used for The Musk Ox's Pipe Dream, those costs don't matter. Otherwise, setting up the facility would cost the same. In the end, it's a wash. It certainly costs more to put panels in geosync orbit than in the Arizona desert. And, not for nuthin, The Musk Ox hasn't made the case for why space-based AI data centers are better than earth-bound ones. If nothing else, at ~22,000 miles up, all of the nasties from Out There don't get filtered by our atmosphere and not so much of the magnetosphere; you won't lose all of it, as it goes out to ~40,000 miles.

As to the sun coverage, the paper doesn't get to 100% 24/7, but sorta close:

In sum, we can expect shading about 0.7% of the time. Not too bad.