• Breaking through the fourth wall, but I’m an American citizen who is horrified at what the current Administration is doing to the country I love. In the spirit of ‘know your opponent‘ I’ve briefly departed from our normal time with Sy and the gang to shine light on a document that was carefully not publicized prior to the 2024 election. Back to our normal programming next week.
• The material below is based on the Project 2025 document. It’s my understanding that much of the Project’s philosophy underlies and is embedded in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Act (OBBBA) currently working its way through Congress, but I’ve not read through all of that legislation’s ~900 pages (way too many ‘notwithstandings’). From what I’ve seen, the House‑passed version is every bit as contrary to our founding principles. ~ RJO

I expect only a few people have read through 2025 Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation’s manifesto that lays out much of the tactical structure for what the current Administration is trying to accomplish. It’s a hefty tome, nearly 900 pages including a seven‑page list of Contributors. You don’t approach it like a novel; you settle down with a notepad and a supply of coffee, then scan through looking for mentions of your favorite parts of the Federal government.

Someone asked me which were my Top Three things to dislike about the Project 2025 prospectus. It was like asking which three threads in a plaid should be discarded but making no distinction between warp and woof. Plaid’s not that bad a metaphor, because the document has a warp (the underlying notions) and a woof (specific recommendations laid out for every entity in the government).

Some of the warp threads are explicit, proudly highlighted in the 33‑page Forward (quotes are direct from the text)

1. “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” (page 4) — Family is implicitly defined in the follow-on text as male breadwinner, female homemaker, some number of kids, all happily occupied with “the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering.” (page 4) Note that political activity is not in the list. Parents must have veto authority over the entire content of their offspring’s schooling, except that screen time for kids is terrible and must be forbidden.
2. “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” (page 6) — “So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter. Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision‑making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats–not just unelected but seemingly un‑fireable–then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congress’s preening cowardice.” (page 7) On the one hand the Project authors want to return all decision‑making power to Congress, but on the other hand they point to congressional incapacity for the job. Clearly, the authors have an alternative governing structure in mind (see item 5).
3. “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” (page 9) — The “sovereignty, borders and bounty” notions are stretched to cover diatribes against the “managerial elite” (page 10), “globalization” (page 11), “environmental extremism” (page 11) and of course “wokeism” (page 14) in general.
4. “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’ ” (page 13) Consider the moral arrogance and intellectual acrobatics required to transform ‘the pursuit of Happiness’ to “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” (page 13) Such a bleak prospect.

There are also implicit tenets and directives throughout the following 875 pages, there if one looks for them:

5. Abrogation of the Founders’ concept of checks and balances. Federal government power is to be lodged in the Unitary Executive branch, not in Congress (see item 2), not in the Judiciary. Orders come top‑down, which looks like an administrative state under another guise but that would be even further from democratic rule.
   • Notably, OBBBA provision 70302 would largely immunize the Executive branch against being held in contempt if it ignores or violates a Judicial ruling.
6. An imperative to privatize any governmental service that someone might or might not make a profit from.
7. Mean-spirited Social Darwinism, as exemplified by Musk’s remark that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
8. The notion that unregulated is always better than regulated, no matter the social cost.
9. Primacy of corporate/employer rights over worker rights (“union” is mentioned 102 times, “contract” 40 times).
10. Indictment of a supposed “climate crisis industry” (“climate” is mentioned 155 times) along with a spirited defense of the fossil‑fuel industries (“fossil” gets 31 mentions).
11. Religiosity, specifically Christian‑flavored. One telling example — “Congress should encourage communal rest by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to require that workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath.” (page 589)
12. Deprecation of support for basic science and Public Health as governmental responsibilities. Despite more than 1000 uses of the word “science,” NASA is mentioned only once, in a footnote.
13. and a few others I lost track of.

That’s the warp of the plaid, but the woof uses the warp’s tool kit to prescribe actions to be taken in or against (nearly) every Federal Department and Agency, from the office of the White House Chief of Staff through the Cabinet positions out to the independent regulatory agencies ending with the Federal Elections Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Notably not included are the United States Postal Service, the Smithsonian Institution and the Kennedy Center.

My Top Three objectionable items? The document presents hundreds and hundreds of woof‑level recommendations, some of which seem reasonable to me but most of which don’t. In picking anti‑favorites I’ll stick with the warp level. Chief among them are jettisoning checks‑and‑balances, disparagement of science in general and climate change in particular, and the authors’ demonstrated propensity to cling to ideological positions in the face of contrary evidence.  Coming from a union family, I’m not too happy about item 9, either.

Think I’ve mischaracterized what’s in there? Download the document yourself and look through it to check me. Compare the listings to what has transpired so far since January 21. If you care about a particular governmental function (the Veterans Administration, the National Park Service, the Census Bureau, whatever), look up its prognosis. Think about that and decide what you want to do about it. Then do that.

~ Rich Olcott

• A repost from 8 years ago, but it’s become timely again. Eight years ago my concern was data related to Public Health and animal welfare. Subsequent event proved that concern was well‑founded. This time around the climate and Public Health issues are still with us but the likelihood of ideological meddling spreads much more broadly, to research related to psychoactives, guns, citizenship status and more. Forewarned is forearmed.

Sorry, but I’ve got to break into my normal Monday-morning stream to spread this around.  It’s a ProPublica document (click on the link to pull down a copy) detailing safe ways to leak information.

When I first heard about the data-stashing “parties” I thought it was something of an over-reaction.  Climate scientists and students organizing a massive effort to copy important data out of government files in case the new Administration decided to cover it all up somehow.

I’ve changed my mind.

What changed it was USDA’s suddenly blocking access to their animal welfare database, the one that keeps inspection records on research labs, companies, zoos, circuses, and animal transporters and how well they adhere to the Animal Welfare Act.

The agency said in a statement that it revoked public access to the reports “based on our commitment to being transparent …”  Being transparent by blocking information — there’s a certain Orwellian flavor to that, but it gets better.

I followed this article‘s link to see the original statement.  Well, I tried to follow it.  FireFox flat-out refused to show me the page because “Your connection is not secure. The owner of acis.aphis.educ.usda.gov has configured their website improperly.”  The error code was “SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER.” Funny that an official .gov site mucked up its security certificate.

Then I tried Microsoft’s  edge browser, which has less alert security than my beefed-up FireFox.  edge showed me an imposing and somewhat threatening USDA e-Login page including the statements that “Unauthorized or improper use of this system may result in disciplinary action, as well as civil and criminal penalties…. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communications or data transiting or stored on this information system…. Your consent is final and irrevocable…”

All this before Mr Sonny Perdue III is confirmed as the new Secretary of Agriculture. That name rings a bell, right?  Yeah, Perdue Farms, the country’s #3 poultry farmer. It’s hard not to connect dots to the Department suddenly wanting to hide farm inspection records.

So, it’s now pretty clear that we can expect other government-funded databases to disappear without warning, especially databases even remotely related to climate change, drug safety, water supply degradation, … you know, the things that there are regulations about that get in the way when your object is to maximize profits.

So — if you’re in science and you have possession of or access to data (databases, files, whatever) that might be in jeopardy

1. Get it to an offsite and secure backup ASAP
2. When/if it becomes clear that your or the public’s access to that data is about to be restricted, take one or more of the actions laid out in the ProPublica document.

Sometimes it’s rational to be paranoid.

~~ Rich Olcott

From: Robin Feder <rjfeder@fortleenj.com>
To: Sy Moire <sy@moirestudies.com>
Subj: Questions

Dear Mr. Moire, I am a High School student who has a crazy theory about dark matter. I get bored often and do not learn as much as I think most believe I should in science class. I was thinking about dark matter and how it reacts oppositely of how we expect it to. We expect it to probably not follow “normal” physics. This got me thinking about other impossible things the human mind has thought of. One of them caught my mind–absolute zero. The logic connected itself in my mind and later that day I typed up a doc just to keep my ideas. I played with it and the more I thought about it the evidence started to overlap. I have finally found an end to the theory. I am now ready to send this theory with some scientists who actually have the expertise to critique me. Please give me your thoughts as I of course am not fully confident in it. I have a lot of information that I can’t fit in one email so this is all for now. Hope to improve it. Sincerely, Robin Feder

From: Sy Moire <sy@moirestudies.com>
To: Robin Feder <rjfeder@fortleenj.com>
Subj: Re: Questions

My best to your Dad, Robin, you take after him and I’m glad you’re thinking about science. I hear you about the boring — classes often feel that way if the other kids don’t pick things up as quickly as you do. Maybe your teachers can point you to supplementary materials that’ll perk up your interest.

Before we get into your topics I’ll give you some tips that may help your future. The first is, keep an idea notebook. It could be a physical book you keep in your pocket or it could be a directory of files on your phone or computer, doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you record all your ideas as they occur to you so you don’t forget one that might become important later on. In science and other fields, ideas are your stock in trade so you want to preserve your inventory. That absolute‑zero doc is a good start.

Second tip is, after you’ve written down an idea, take a long look at it and ask yourself, “How could I disprove this?” and write that down, too. The essence of science is that it relies more on disproving things than proving them. Get into the habit of thinking about disproof — it’s a powerful way of filtering out incorrect thinking. Works better in some areas than others but in general there’s forward progress.

The reason I highlighted “after” up there is that the first thought, even if it’s wrong, often leads to second and third thoughts that are better. If you discard ideas too quickly you limit yourself. Think of it as an ongoing one‑person brainstorming session. So write first, maybe cross off later, OK?

Third tip is, read up on what your idea is about. A lot. Every field of study has its own “language,” a set of words and concepts that people in the field generally understand. You need to have some command of those if you’re going to ask them clear questions about your idea.

That’s for two reasons. The most important is that using the correct terminology speeds up communication — neither you nor they will have to stop and explain a term or concept. But in addition, if you use the words and concepts properly that tells your conversation partner that you respect their time enough to have done your initial reading.

Fourth tip is where to look for that initial reading. Most textbooks, even shiny freshly-printed ones, are decades behind the current research frontiers. You need to go deeper. You’ll Google your topic, of course, to find popular science articles. Here’s another path to more recent work. Start at a good Wikipedia article. Follow the links to its key recent footnotes and Google the names of the paper’s authors. Many of them will have blogs that they write for a student audience. Follow those blogs.

Looking forward to reading those two files.

Regards,
Sy Moire.

~~ Rich Olcott

I wrote the italicized text for another forum, but I’m reposting it here because my head and heart and the times demand it…

We’ll soon be in the month of our national Independence Day so it’s appropriate to point out that we’re living in an Age of Heroes.  We’ve had heroes all along, of course — the Founding Fathers and Mothers, the military who defend the country we’ve built, the first responders who run toward danger to protect the rest of us. 

Less lauded but still crucial is another group of heroes – parents, teachers, caregivers and others who take on responsibility for nurturing and supporting people who for whatever reason can’t handle the challenge themselves.  These heroes may not risk bodily damage but the emotional toll can be devastating.  It says something positive for our society that we have so many in this group.

But in the past few months we’ve come to recognize yet another category of heroism.  From maintenance and transportation staff to the entire farm‑to‑table supply chain workforce, these people have quietly continued their tasks in the face of COVID‑19, with or without protective measures in place.  Without their brave efforts our cities and economy would have been weakened far more than they have been. 

Those three categories together comprise a significant fraction of our population.  In my opinion, there’s a lesson there that our country has been too slow to learn.  Humans got where we are because we’re a societal species.  The Western Frontier closed a century ago.  Even the legendarily reclusive “mountain men” had to come into town occasionally for medical care or supplies they just couldn’t produce on their own.  In the past few months, our distress with social distancing and our burgeoning activity on social media highlight just how much we want/need to interact with other people.

Like it or not, we are all part of society.  Moreover, the smooth functioning of our society depends on our collaboration.  I’m not arguing an absolutist position here – cooperation leaves plenty of room for competition and individual liberty (how best to organize the economy is a separate discussion).  But I do think we need official and explicit recognition of the fact that what I do affects you and what you do affects me.

Here’s my modest proposal – let’s rename the Fourth of July as National Interdependence Day.

Part of being societal, of course, is the impulse to protect those about us. That’s why many of those on the Thin Blue Line got into the force and I’m grateful and more than a little awed. But as we’ve seen, some of them don’t live up to what’s expected of them.

“There’s some bad apples in every barrel,” has been said too often. The question is, why are they still there? The line officers know better than anyone else the characters of their peers. Can’t they get rid of the bad apples themselves?

The most common defense I’ve heard from my LEO friends has been along the lines of, “Out there we can only survive if we know we have each other’s backs. If I write up a complaint and if the higher-ups don’t desk or boot the guy, he’ll look the other way the next time something goes down when we’re on the street together.” That culture must change, for the sake of the good cops and the rest of us.

There are some indications that the no-snitch attitude may be changing as the unions and PD administrators and prosecutors realize that bad cops directly contribute to the deadly conditions the rest have to work under. I sure hope so.

In closing, I highly recommend this thought piece from Trevor Noah, who is far more than a comedian. Please do listen through to the end. Then think about it. Then do something.

~~ Rich Olcott