The Meteoric Rise of Mediocrity in the USA

How the Right-Wing has diminished the greatness of the USA. Reagan caused the housing crisis and so many other ills of the USA.

Griffith Park, Los Angeles, built during the heyday of social democracy in the USA before the Reagan Republicans ruined our country.

Imagine publically funded projects such as the Capitol Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, The Boeing 747, the internet, lithium ion batteries, the transistor, solar panels, computers, Kennedy’s moon project, LaGuardia Airport, Griffith Park, to name a few, being invented and built in today’s regressive political and business climate. The libertarians are here, and they don’t build greatness. They conserve. Some of them, such as Musk and Ramaswamy, are thieves who employ pump-and-dump schemes. The insitution of social democracy that built a great USA, now gone, has been used by China to become the world’s leader in science and technology. Most people in the USA haven’t been to China. I have. And I can tell you that their technology is superior to ours in the USA. And if you think we have a democracy in the USA, wake-up. Our government is a corporate duopoly, coming under control of the wealthy during the Reagan years, where a few wealthy people choose between two people to represent them as president. However, when making a binary choice, the Democrats have been better than Republicans in supporting the middle class, manufacturing, and innovation in the USA.

Government funded projects, other than the military, have been on the wane since the 80s, and businesses, such as Boeing, are no longer innovating great products – instead they use their profits to buy back stock so that the rich become richer. Right-wingers saw to it that regulations preventing corporate stock buy-backs were eliminated, leading to cash in the pockets of the wealthy instead of cash for innovation. Example, the failed Boeing 737 Max. A cheap boondoggle. A poorly redesigned aircraft from the 1950s. Match that with the deregulated airline industry, and people are now riding in unsafe jets for much greater costs and with much less convenience. The airline industry was safter, more comfortable, convenient, and less expensive when it was regulated.

Kennedy’s moon project, something that stood on the shoulders of Eisenhower’s education and technology initiatives, in the 1960s was a thing of beauty. Something, one of few things, that could unite our country, indeed the world, if only, briefly. Kennedy’s Moon Shot brought much to the USA, and as a young boy growing up in the 60s and 70s, it helped to foster my desire to be a scientist and engineer. The fianance guys, not the scientists and engineers, are in charge of our technology companies. Sadly, the other large space company, SpaceX, is launching automobiles and billionaires into space, accomplishing what NASA did in 1965. And the Starship will never make it to the moon, and Musk’s studdering rants about Mars are dark humor – dark because his BS is robbing capital from the US people and destroying Earth’s atmosphere. The deregulation and privatization of NASA is one more right-wing folly. Letting SpaceX and Boeing essentially run most of NASA is a disaster. Bye-bye to our science and technology lead, hello to a hollowed-out industry interetsed in short term profits for the wealthy and billionaire fantasies..

With most of society’s capital flowing to rich men given they are no longer taxed (through various schemes), the working people’s capital is no longer used to support those who work – the middle class. Instead, we now have billionaires blasting themselves and their friends into space. This serves no one other than the billionaire class. Meanwhile, two middle class astronauts are stuck in space because of a failed space mission led by Boeing, a once great company hollowed-out by Republican’s deregulation of industry. As written in Fortune magazine, a pro-business outlet, “Boeing needs is engineers—not financiers—to lead it into the future.” Reaganesque financialization of our industry has led to short term profits and long term decay of our businesses.

As the USA, because of the Reagan Revolution, becomes what the UK (the Thatcher Revolution) has become, a hollowed-out shell of it former self, with China becoming the world’s new leader in science and technology, the USA must once again tax the wealthy and use its capital to support the middle class with the long-term investments in society and public institutions that innovation requires. Venture capitalists and private equity bring quick monetary schemes, little or no long term innovation, and extract enormous quantities of society’s capital for self-aggrandizing purposes. Using society’s capital in, for example, a venture-backed company in Austin, TX, RealPage, to create algorithms so that rich people can collude to overtake the rental and real eatate markets. leaving the middle class destitute, is part of our deregulated, rich man’s government that is destroying the USA.

Government Funding of Innovation Began Dropping in the 1980s Under Reagan- Now Most of What We See is Monetization of Old Technologies.

Semiconductors, solar panels, the internet, lithium ion batteries, computers, rockets, satellites, jet airplanes, modern tires, SIRI, liquid crystal display and multi–touch screen, MRI, radar, wind energy, GPS, Google, LEDs, and AI all originated through government funding – long ago.

Government funded supersonic jet aircraft developed in San Diego and first flown in 1956. A time when the wealthy were taxed, and society’s capital was used for innovation, and not simple monetization, through government funding.

From Science, “A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded.” Beginning in the 80s under Reagan, we saw the “government is the problem, not the solution” ideology take hold in the vast number of undereducated people in the USA. Morons loved this moron. And many of the wealthy loved that a moron could be president and be told what to do in order to make the wealthy, wealthier.

The leadership in science and engineering that Eisenhower and Kennedy had developed was under attack. Reagan had done this as governor of California. By 1963, the University of California, Berkeley had more Nobel Laureates than did Harvard. As Governor of California, Reagan saw to it that the world’s greatest public university would be harmed, thereby weakening the upward mobility of the lower and middle classes, and slowing the world’s greatest innovation center. And now as President, he was on the tear throughout the USA. His hands-off policies that didn’t support the building of new semicondutor fabs in the USA, led to the efflux of the industry to Japan starting with memory chips. That knowledge base and know-how shift would lead to Asia becoming dominant in semiconductor manufacturing as we now see. Things were better in the USA before Reagan, but he was unknowingly Asia’s best friend. NAFTA was his baby, and sending jobs and industry know-how overseas is his legacy.

In the 1950s, before the privatization and deregulation of the neoliberal cultists took over the US government where, for example, the capital of the US is used to launch crypto bros into space for a joyride, we had a generation of government supported scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers with the concept of artificial intelligence (or AI) formalized in their minds. Alan Turing, a young British polymath with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University, who explored the mathematical possibility of artificial intelligence, was key to AI’s beginnings. From 1957 to 1974, AI flourished. Government funding would develop computers that could store more information and they became faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Machine learning algorithms developed at our universities also improved and people became better at knowing which algorithm to apply to their problem. Early demonstrations such as those by Drs. Newell and Simon’s General Problem Solver and Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA at MIT showed promise toward the goals of problem solving and the interpretation of spoken language respectively. These successes, as well as the advocacy of leading researchers (namely the attendees of the DSRPAI) convinced government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund AI research at several institutions.

During these times, government funded research at UC Berkeley led to the integrated circuit, the software to analyze integrated circuits called SPICE, the new RISC computer architecture, and the 3-dimensional transistor. All of these were major advances in the computers we use today.

By 1986, all of us involved in computers and cognitive science had to read, “Parallel distributed processing : explorations in the microstructure of cognition,” a seminal book from UCSD professor, Dr. David E. Rumelhart, Ph.D. and Stanford Professor, James L. McClelland, Ph.D. John Hopfield at Caltech and David Rumelhart at UCSD popularized “deep learning” techniques that allowed computers to learn using experience. But government funding began to drop and more of the R&D was happening at companies. Market incentives aren’t always aligned to long-term, capital-intensive R&D efforts. And goal directed research at private companies doesn’t lead to big innovative changes, just incremental change. For example, no company would have invented the transistor. The market wouldn’t know what a transistor is, and wouldn’t have told the companies there is a need for one. Rather, the market was demanding better vacuum tubes.

Where does innovation arise? Government funding, mostly at our universities. Back when presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy recognized the power of government to innovate through supporting science and engineering at our universities. Reagan killed that – first as governor of California, then as president of the USA. Exemplifying Reagan’s conservative bent was his ripoing-out of the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had implemented at the White House. Carter, a nuclear engineer, graduate of Anapolis, one of Admiral Rickover’s key nuclear engineers in the new nuclear submarine fleet, looked to the future. Reagan, looked to the past.

Reagan began killing the middle class, and everything that supported it, including education. Taxes on the wealthy and the corporations were obliterated, but increased on the middle class. Now capital would flow into the private sector, a private sector that he deregulated, leading to the great monetization paradigm. The government created the internet, for example, but in Reagan’s privatized, deregulated structure, it would become the rich man’s social media, espousing the rich man’s libertarian values and selling all kinds of worthless junk, like the supplement du jour. Elon Musk, who took over Tesla using hostile tactics on its founders, would use the internet to poo-poo government funding of R&D – this, of course, after he had received billions of dollars from the US government. The people’s money had made Musk a fortune. And, as Dr. Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. at Berkeley teaches us in the Power Paradox, when people become rich and powerful, they often become stupid – they lose contact with the world and think they are king shit – witness Elon Musk. Self aggrandizement becomes their game as we see in Bill Gates. And society’s capital that Gates accumulated would be mispent of dumb projects, such as his education iniative. Money and power = hubris. Often.

Who benefits from this Reaganomics nonsense? The billionaires and millionaires who are extracting capital from society, without having created anything. This is a big part of the downfall of the USA; why we are becoming what the UK is now, a hollowed-out shell of its former self, and why the Chinese have now taken the technolgical lead. The Chinese use the old USA playbook that Eisenhower and Kennedy gave us. Government funds R&D.

Those were exciting times in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A new field had started. Much progress has been made since, but we also see the monetization schemes backed by gobs of VC money, society’s capital, creating useless dross. For example, Sam Bankman-Fried’s attempts to influence A.I. stem from his involvement in “effective altruism,” a philanthropic movement in which donors seek to maximize the impact of their giving for the long term. Effective altruists are often concerned with what they call catastrophic risks, such as pandemics, bioweapons and nuclear war. It’s all a private enterprise scam to convince the public that billionaires are altruistic. Sam and his VC-backed firm, FTX, a rip-off scheme in the Bahamas, is an example of the billions of dollars (FTX wasted $2 billion in “investment”) being wasted by non-governmental “innovation” schemes. Capital was extracted from society by Brinkman-Fried, and no innovation resulted but the capital that could have led to innovation was wasted. The same goes for Elizabeth Holmes and her rip-off scheme, Theranos. She is the daughter of an executive at the Houston, Texas-based Enron, another rip-off scheme that bankrupted many a small business in California.

Current rocket technology was developed in Germany through government funding, which continued when the US government began funding those German scientists and engineers here in the USA. Government funding would lead to the Atlas rocket being developed in San Diego at Convair (you can see it here in a Route 66 episode)and carry the first US astronaut into orbit. Later, Dr. Werner von Braun’s team would put the first man on the moon, in 1969, through JFK’s directive. Compare what we had in the 60s to Musk’s privatized exploding Starships.

It’s time to rid ourselves of the corporate shills running the USA, such as Donald Trump and Joe Biden (although Biden has been much, much better than Trump or any Republican since Nixon in funding R&D), and vote for people who support the middle class and the education of the people – vote Dr. Cornel West, Ph.D., professor at the Union Theological Seminary, affiliated with Columbia University.

Enjoy Your High Fat Keto Diet And The Cancer That Comes With It

Scientists know there is a link between obesity and some cancers. A study in mice and people suggests why a high-fat diet increased the number of Desulfovibrio bacteria in the guts of mice, suppressing their immune systems and accelerating tumor growth. Studies of how to show that correlation is causation.

A Desulfovibrio bacterium. This group of gut bacteria has been linked to a suppressed immune system, which can allow breast-cancer tumors to flourish. Credit: PNWL/Alamy

Judah Pearl’s treatise in The Book of Why has laid to rest the idea that the notion of causality should be avoided in science. Here’s an example from scientists in China about how a high fat diet causes cancer.

Besides making you old by inducing cellular senescence, keto diets increase your probability of cancer. Let’s look at how keto diets cause cancer. Published in PNAS, researchers sampled tissue and fecal from 61 people with breast cancer at the SunYat-Sen Memorial Hospital in China, before the participants started treatment. Women whose BMI exceeded 24, the authors’ threshold for obesity classification, had higher levels of bacteria in the Desulfovibrio genus than did those whose BMI was lower than 24.

Next, the scientists in China used mice to further explore this link. Mice that are fed a high-fat diet often serve as a proxy for human obesity in animal studies. The team found that mice consuming a high-fat diet had more Desulfovibrio bacteria and had elevated levels of a type of cell that suppresses the immune system, myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), which originate in the bone marrow. This suggested to the researchers that higher numbers of Desulfovibrio bacteria, a type of dysbiosis, and a suppressed immune system were linked.

The next clue. The mice fed a high-fat-diet mice also had higher levels of the amino acid leucine circulating in their blood than did mice fed a normal diet. Knowing that leucine can be made by particular types of gut bacteria, the team treated the mice with antibiotics that killed Desulfovibrio. Treatment caused both MDSC and leucine levels to return to normal.

With knowledge gained from the mice studies, the researchers returned to the blood samples that they had taken from the people with breast cancer. Correlating with the mice studies, those with a BMI of more than 24 had higher levels of leucine, more immunosuppressive MDSCs and survived fewer years post-treatment than those with a lower BMI. This means Desulfovibrio bacteria benefited from a high-fat diet and made excess leucine. This caused a spike in the numbers of MDSCs, which suppress the immune system and allow tumors to grow.

Their findings reveal that the “diet-gut–bone marrow–tumor” axis is involved in high fat diet-mediated cancer progression and opens a broad avenue for anticancer prevention strategies by targeting the aberrant metabolism of the gut microbiota through dietary modification. You are what you eat, and so are the microbial co-inhabitants of your body. It’s time for everyone to be “Thinking and Eating for Two.”

Another Physician Fakes His Data, Including Clinical Trial Data

The NIH has paused clinical trials for 3K3A-APC, a stroke drug candidate sponsored by ZZ Biotech, a Texas-based company co-founded by Berislav V. Zlokovic, M.D., professor and chair of the department of physiology and neuroscience at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Imagine being killed by a fake drug because a physician falsified his data – evidence suggests that happened in a clinical trial sponsored by ZZ Biotech of Houston, Texas.

Berislav Zlokovic, dressed in his medical grade bowtie and white jacket, has a medical degree from the University of Belgrade and currently practices medical fraud at USC.

The LA Times has updated the case against physician fraudster, Berislove Zlokovic. Three of Zlokovic’s research papers have been retracted by the journal that published them because of problems with their data or images. Journals have issued corrections for seven more papers in which Zlokovic is the only common author, with one receiving a second correction after the new supplied data were found to have problems as well. An 11th paper co-authored by Zlokovic the journal Nature Medicine issued an expression of concern, a note journals append to articles when they have reason to believe there may be a problem with the paper but have not conclusively proven so. Since Zlokovic and his co-authors no longer had the original data for one of the questioned figures, the editors wrote, “[r]eaders are therefore alerted to interpret these results with

Late last year, a group of whistleblowers submitted a report to the National Institutes of Health that questioned the integrity of a celebrated USC neuroscientist’s research and the safety of an experimental stroke treatment his company was developing.

The whistleblower report submitted to NIH identified allegedly doctored images and data in 35 research papers in which Zlokovic was the sole common author. The LA Times reports that, “Both Zlokovic and representatives for USC declined to comment, citing an ongoing review initiated in the wake of the allegations, which were first reported in the journal Science.”

For many years, scientists have tried to reduce the brain cell death, bleeding, and inflammation that can follow a stroke, some of which results from disruption of the blood-brain barrier—a system of tiny blood vessels that delivers oxygen and nutrients but shields the brain from toxic substances. tPA, the only approved stroke drug in the United States and Europe, can vastly reduce death and disability by clearing a stroke’s blockage, but the drug, too, can cause dangerous brain bleeding. 3K3A-APC could help mitigate such damage and prevent brain cells from dying, ZZ Biotech said.

Because of its potential to address an unmet medical need, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the compound “fast track” status, with the prospect of “accelerated approval and priority review.”.

But a 113-page dossier obtained by Science from a small group of whistleblowers paints a less encouraging picture. The dossier, which they submitted to NIH, highlights evidence from the phase 2 trial that the experimental remedy might have actually increased deaths in the first week after treatment: Six of the 66 stroke patients who received 3K3A-APC died within this period, compared with one among 44 in the placebo group, although the death rate evened out after a month. Patients who received the drug also trended toward greater disability and dependency at the end of the trial, 90 days after treatment.

Deepening the concern, the dossier also highlights evidence that dozens of papers from Zlokovic’s lab—including many supporting the idea that the compound was ready for human testing—contain seemingly doctored data that suggest scientific misconduct. The whistleblowers say apparent changes to images used for protein identification and other purposes seem to skew results in favor of the scientist’s hypotheses, which include influential ideas about the blood-brain barrier and its role in stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as how 3K3A-APC supposedly affects it.

Physicians Are Killing People with Broad Spectrum Antibiotic Prescriptions

A new study suggest that treatment with piperacillin/tazobactam, a broad spectrum antibiotic that kills commensal anerobic bacteria in the gut, instead of cefepime may contribute to one additional death per every 20 septic patients treated. Increased duration of organ dysfunction results too. This is another example of physician ineptitude in their over prescribing and poor choice of antibiotics.

Physicians overprescribe antibiotics leading to numerous pathologies in their patients, including inflammatory disorders.

A recent clinical trial compared two antibiotics and their side effects and mortality after two weeks. That trial did not find any differences in the short term, meaning that both antibiotics controlled the patient’s infection. When looking at two-week outcomes in the study, they didn’t find differences either. But the differences at three months were dramatic. The new findings suggest that treatment with piperacillin/tazobactam instead of cefepime may contribute to one additional death per every 20 septic patients treated, and also create more organ dysfunction.

A 5% mortality difference has enormous implications because sepsis in hospital is so common. Every day in the USA, thousands of clinicians are deciding which of these drugs to use in septic patients. Why on Earth would physicians choose an antibiotic that wipes-out the good bacteria in the gut? This is another example of physicians causing disease, which they do often.

Commensal bacteria in the gut are critical for health.  Diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, bowel inflammatory disease and difficult-to-treat bacterial infections due to antibiotic resistance have been linked with dysbiosis. Using broad spectrum antibiotics instead of more targeted antibiotics, and using antibiotics only when they are truly needed, will save lives and reduce the number of people maimed by the poor prescribing habits of physicians.

Austin is Where Ambition Continues to Die

Tesla in Austin is Imploding, Oracle Just Left, and Startups Literally Die in Austin – As a Panelist at SWSW Said, It’s a Place “Incompatible With Living a Heathy Life.” Meanwhile, the San Francisco tech scene keeps growing.

Tesla Semi, built in Texas, Being Towed by Diesel Truck

Not only did Big Tech not move into Austin as the conservative media hype had led us to believe, the little bit that is in Austin is crashing and people are leaving and the population is decreasing. Record vacancies for Austin business offices continues in 2025. The big news a few years ago was Oracle moving its HQ from the SF Bay Area to Austin after Texas gave Oracle many millions of dollars and free land, but of course, it was mostly hype and millions of taxpayer’s dollars given to a billionaire. California retained far more workers than the few who went to Texas – even Missouri had more Oracle workers than Texas.

Build it in dirty, filty Austin, and they will not come. Not only do they not come, they leave in droves. Living in the sweatiest city in the USA leaves much to be desired. Texas is so backward that kids going to school in Texas must now learn to embrace rape, violence, and slavery given the Bible is now part of the school curriculim in Texas. Austin is the most debt-ridden city in the USA, and people there are miserable. They’re headed back to California, home to 5 of the top 10 greenest cities in the US (Austin ain’t one of them), including #1 San Francisco, many joining the AI revolution in San Francisco, in a state with the largest number of Fortune 500 companies. The SF Bay Area also has 49% of all big tech engineers and 27% of startup engineers in the USA. That talent pool in SF has also grown, rather than declined, since 2022, meaning the right-wing, conservative chatter that San Francisco was past its peak is BS. SF is where clean air is valued, not petroleum and polluting factories. Many have moved their companies to San Francisco, not from San Francisco. And true to form, the office space demand in San Francisco for office space under 20,000sq/ft is hotter than ever.

To meet the demand in SF, new buildings, such as a new 41 story office/resedential complex, the redone, iconic TransAmerica Pyramid, and a 47 story resedential complex and a 72 story residential tower, are going-up in downtown SF. Walk through downtown San Francisco and you’ll even find the latest generation of geosynchronous small satellites, which will put Starlink out of business, being designed and manufactured at Astranis’ headquarters. When it’s about 110 deg F in Austin, where everybody hibernates inside for about 5 months straight during the summer, the people of San Francisco are outside, partying and building their businesses. Then winter hits Austin. It’s cold, dank, and the trees are barren. The place is brown, and the severe drought doesn’t help.

About 6.1 million square feet of office space is empty in downtown Austin. Austin’s commercial vacancy rate hit a staggering 30 percent in the third quarter 2023. Houston, Austin, and Dallas lead the nation in empty offices, twice that of New York and San Francisco. Austin is part of the Texas Triangle of Doom. High rise buildings in Texas are in trouble. In addition to Tesla and Oracle leaving Austin, companies in Austin like Indeed, which laid-off 2,000 employees in Austin last year in 2023 with more happening in 2024, are ridding themselves of employees at high rates. All tech sectors are affected.

In Austin, part of one of the most dangerous states in the country with increasing rates of firearm deaths, a supposed tech hotspot, they hold a tech conference, and the attendees boo tech. And if you’re looking for a city with great live music, San Diego, CA has more live music venues than Austin, Texas in addition to being the most green city and the most biodiverse city in the US, along with being the 4th largest tech hub behind San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Austin, besides being land-locked and known for its bad weather and flooding, and the home of conservative, Trump-loving nutjobs such as Greg Abbott, Alex Jones, and Matthew McConaughey, let’s have a look at a few more reasons why Austin is attracting few and losing many tech jobs.

Tesla Cybertruck, built in Texas, being towed by diesel truck

Musk Kills Everything He Makes in Austin, Texas

Everything Musk does in Texas dies – the Cybertruck, the Tesla Semi, Starship, the 4680 Battery, and the Boring Co. For example, the 4680 batteries (made by Panasonic for Tesla) are more expensive, slower charging, and have less energy density than the old 2170 batteries developed by Panasonic. Tesla continues to crash, and another round of layoffs, the 4th in 4 weeks, underscores Tesla’s dimming prospects under Musk. Success for Tesla arose in California when two engineers, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, and their team created Tesla and it’s successful technologies. Musk was given at least $64 million Texas taxpayer dollars to build his factory in Texas, and in return he creates an environmental disaster. California still has twice as many Tesla employees than does Texas, and the jobs are much higher paying in CA. The history of economic development incentives shows that communities often give up more than they receive.

To return Tesla to doing something successful, as it did under Eberhard and Tarpenning in CA, Musk returned the HQ of Tesla back to CA. Such a shit show is Tesla now, Musk had to lay-off 10% of his workers, and the it’s only becoming worse. It’s a shame what Musk has done to a successful company, thanks to Martin and Marc, that once, but no longer, had a huge lead in the electric car space.

Musk neither founded Tesla nor developed any of its technologies. Similar for SpaceX. Musk cofounded SpaceX with Tom Mueller, an engineer, who developed the SpaceX technologies along with his engineering team- and Musk doesn’t manage SpaceX. If he did, it would have died long ago.

Oracle Leaves Austin, Texas

Take the Texas Money and Run, Larry Ellison

Now Oracle has left Austin after having been given millions of dollars from Texas taxpayers – Tennessee has given billionaire Larry Ellison $250 million of its taxpayer’s dollars to move to the land of the KKK, Nashville. In turn, Ellison sends Texan’s money to Israel to continue its genocide. You can’t make this stuff up! Truth is stranger than fiction.

Meanwhile the schools in Texas are absolute garbage, and running out of money. Public schools have been privatized and these privateers are actually taking Texas taxpayer’s dollars and sending the money out of state. Talk about a moronic, mismanaged state with Greg Abbott at the helm.

Austin, Texas Technology Accelerator, Newchip, Kills Entrepreneur’s Companies

Lacey Hunter had big dreams as she put her startup through the three-month Newchip accelerator program. Startups spent thousand of dollars, up to $20,000 for its training programs. and here’s the killer. Startups also granted Newchip the right to buy $250,000 worth of shares in the company at a later date, but at their current valuation, presumably at much lower cost before the startup achieves success and the valuation greatly increases. This type of deal is known as a warrant.

Here’s the killer. Newchip filed for bankruptcy in May 2023. Things went from bad to worse later that year when Lacey Hunter discovered warrants of her company — rights to buy an ownership stake — had become part of the proceedings, which ultimately forced her to shut down her company. Newchip has hurt many other entrepreneurs in Austin.

Silicon Valley in California is the king of tech, but even San Diego has a much bigger tech scene than Austin. During 2023, San Diego startups netted more money than Austin, featuring companies that make solar automobiles, semiconductors, drones, autonomous vehicles, lithium ion battery technologies, lithium ion extraction technologies, lithium ion batteries, and robots, for example. Funding of start-ups in San Diego has increased by 84% over the last year. A huge tech sector in San Diego is anchored by giants like Qualcomm, General Atomics, Dexcom, Cymer, Illumina, Teradata, Cubic, ViaSat, and the 3rd largest biotech hub in the country. And just north of San Diego is Los Angeles, with its even larger tech scene, espeically in aerospace.

The hype is over, and the few tech workers who moved to Austin are returning to California, joining other tech workers who are moving there from other places and joining entities such as General Motors’ new 50,000 sq/ft tech center in Mountain View, as the billionaires move anywhere that will give them hundreds of millions of taxpayer’s dollars.

Texas Gives Billionaires Millions to Move Their Businesses and Pollute, and Then the Tech Companies Move and Fire

The state of Texas is an inclement cesspool and worsening. Whether it’s Austin, Bastrop, or Boca Chica, Musk is making a mess. He’s messed with Texas, and the State loves it. The Texas government gives billionaires such as Musk and Ellison hundreds of millions of dollars to move their businesses to Texas, and the businesses pollute, move-on, and or fire their employees. It’s the same old story for Texas, and they just keep doing it.

Whether it’s Lady Bird Lake in Austin, where Oracle was headquartered for a couple of years and polluted it, Tesla near Austin that is polluting the area, Tesla/Boring Co in Bastrop that is polluting it, or Boca Chica that is being polluted by SpaceX, billionaires are being given hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to pollute, move-on, and fire at will the workers that the Texans paid for. Oracle’s boss, the Zionist Larry Ellison, uses the Texas-give-away money to fund Israel’s genocide and Netanyahu himself. And what’s the result, Austin, Texas is collapsing and the businesses are leaving. Meanwhile, all the money spent on billionaires leaves the schools in Texas without the funding they need – funding is dropping bigly.

So bad is education in Texas, Musk had to move his headquarters back to California from Texas, in what is described as it’s “co-headquarters” and reestablish Tesla’s engineering center in Palo Alto, CA. Tesla’s largest footprint remains in California, where it has more than 47,000 employees. The headquarters will add to Tesla’s hardware and software engineering facility in Palo Alto, its auto plant in Fremont, its development and testing facility in San Diego, Design Studio in Hawthorne, and its Megapack production facility in Lathrop. You won’t hear Greg Abbott talking about this, telling his taxpayers that he spent their money in a give away to a billionaire, who took the money and ran.

In December 2023, following one of Austin’s miserably hot summer (110 deg F for about 3 months straight), TechCrunch wrote that start-ups were fleeing the city, which was “losing its luster.” Many of the Californians who moved to the hell-hole during the pandemic realized they had traded paradise for a polluted regressive city where Trump-loving Greg Abbott, Matthew McConaughey, and Alex Jones reside, and they moved back for higher incomes on the beautiful Pacific Coast. Despite conservative-corporate media’s hype, Texas never approached what California has. Texas may compete at the level of Florida and Colorado, but that’s nowhere close to CA or NY. That was reflected in the tech industry’s VC financials. Venture capitalists invested $6.75 billion in Austin start-ups in 2021 (in San Diego County alone, startups raised $9.6 billion, but progressive California cities don’t receive the conservative corporate hype), but in 2023 they invested only $3.8 billion. Funding also fell in the Silicon Valley amid an industry-wide crunch, but the Bay Area remained king by far, with companies there raising more than $60 billion in investment in 2023. Combine that with the huge tech scenes in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley-Oakland, and Sacramento, and California is orders of magnitude above what Texas has.

Oracle’s decision to move its HQ out of Texas after less than four years is a reminder that global companies will use taxpayers dollars in Texas and Tennessee and then move-on to greener pastures when the green means taxpayer give aways in another state. And when they’re done, the pasture looks like the mess at Austin’s Tesla gigafactory. Austin is decaying. Unless you like horrible weather, fetid lakes and rivers, a mediocre tech scene, and unhealthy salty-sweet fatty meat with cancer-causing nitrosamines at every meal, your won’t stay long in Austin.

Zionist Larry Ellison Moves From CA to Texas to Tennessee To Rob the Middle Class

Playing the leaders of the cities and states of Texas and Tennessee like the fools they are, Zionist Larry Ellison is taking middle class taxpayer money to promote his Zionist agenda. And as Texas and Tennessee give away taxpayer dollars to the billionaire, California really remains the home based of Oracle.

Tennessee and the city of Nashville gave Oracle $250 million to partially move there in 2021, and the amount given to Oracle in 2024 for the full move is undisclosed. In 2020 the state of Texas and the city of Austin gave Oracle an undisclosed amount of money to move there from California. The deal in Texas involved land swapping. Ellison owns 42.9 percent of the shares of Oracle Corporation, and is the 7th richest guy on the planet. He is apparently a Zionist spy for Israel. Guys like Zionist Larry Ellison, whose mother, Florence Spellman, was an unwed Jewish mother, play the leaders of cities and states against one another, and accumulate more of the middle classes’ money as Ellison funds Israel, the IDF, illegal Zionist settlers, and Netanyahu himself.

Remember, thanks to tax cuts brought to us by the Reagan Revolution, billionaires in the USA pay little or no taxes. So billionaire income, instead of being used to support the USA, now supports Israel where the occupiers of Palestine (aka Zionists) have free education and free medical care – middle class Americans pay for it.

Who’s next after Tennessee for the billionaire Zionist, Florida?

Elon Musk’s Pollution of the Atmosphere

The bullshitting Ketamine Kid is launching thousands of low earth orbit Star Link satellites that only stay in orbit for 5 years and then crash through the atmosphere, burning and creating atmosphere-destroying chemicals that lead to ozone holes, and magnetospheric perturbations.

Musk is a depressed person who had a difficult childhood, including an abusive father. Such a bad person is Musk, a misanthrope, he stole Tesla from it’s founders and pretended to be the founder, co-founded SpaceX but didn’t create any of its technology and doesn’t manage the company, but pretends to do so. He does the same with his other companies, where he pretends to be the technology guru and constantly positions himself in the media, avenues through which he spews total bullshit. On Twitter (yes, the URL is still Twitter), Musk is everywhere. In a leveraged buyout, Musk controls Twitter and uses it to spew his BS. Twitter is spiraling down as a result. Same with Tesla. Now that the technology and cars created by Tesla’s founders, Eberhard and Tarpenning, are old and new technologies need to be developed under Musk, the company is faltering. Cases in point are self-driving, the Cybertruck (his most recent joke), the 4680 battery, and the Tesla Semi – all are huge failures. Everything Tesla makes in Texas is a failure, as the “anything goes Texas” allows Musk to pollute the Austin area. When Musk is in charge, expect a mess.

And for creating a mess at Tesla, Musk wants a reward of $56 billion. Yes, that’s an illion with a big B. Given what Musk has done to Tesla, $56 illion with an M would be joke, but with a B it’s a ketamine-induced psychosis that may come to reality given the Directors of the company “feel there is an expectation to consume drugs with him [Musk] because they think refraining could upset the billionaire.” Rich, privileged people like Elon Musk should read The Power Paradox by Prof. Dr. Dacher Keltner, PhD, professor of psychology at Berkeley, to understand how stupid they are. They should also read Thinking Fast and Slow by Prof. Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Princeton and Berkeley, to understand how lucky they are.

As Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect writes, “there’s a well-established American corporate tradition of rewarding their CEO fuckups with large paychecks. David Calhoun, whom Boeing recently showed the door after various other doors were found to be loosely attached, if attached at all, to some Boeing-made planes, will get a going-away present of between $26 million and $45 million, according to a report in Fortune. Warner Bros. Discovery had a lousy year in 2023, losing $3 billion, but it somehow managed to reward its CEO, David Zaslav, with a $50 million paycheck.” Frankly, what I’m seeing is the USA becoming the next UK. A hollowed-out country with a small group of self-indulgent billionaires, the donor class, who falsely think they’re smart, using their money to buy power and set the direction of our failing nation. Examples of being hollowed-out: Jack Welch did it at the once grand company, GE. And Jack’s protege, Dave Calhoun, did it at Boeing. Musk is now doing it at the company and its technologies founded by, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla. He’s also in the process of ruining SpaceX, the company he co-founded with engineer Tom Mueller and with some other great engineers, of which, Musk is not – not great, and not an engineer.

So Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s a fake, and a serial inventor of things that have already been invented. He’s clueless about satellites too. Unlike meteorites, which are small and only contain trace amounts of aluminum, wrecked spacecraft are huge and consist mainly of aluminum and other exotic, highly conductive materials. And highly conductive materials can create charging effects and act as a magnetic shield. Without the magnetosphere, Earth’s layered atmosphere would deteriorate due to the constant bombardment of solar wind. And without our uniquely layered atmosphere that protects us from harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation and traps heat, life on Earth wouldn’t be possible. Our magnetosphere keeps us alive. It should be protected as an Earth environment. Instead, we’re filling it with electronic waste so that billionaires can trade electromagnetic signals for dollars they really don’t need.

There are much better performing satellites for communications, and they don’t crash back to Earth. ViaSat here in San Diego has the best performing communications satellites.

Unfortunately, Elon Musk is a depressed, misanthrope who bullshits people about colonizing Mars, and cares not if he destroys Earth.

Americans Are Taking Many Drugs That Don’t Work – Society’s Capital is Making People Sick and the Rich, Richer

Companies and physicians at the FDA are increasingly using fast-track approval processes to bring treatments that don’t work to patients.

I detail the problems of the US treatment system in my book, The Medicalization of America. One of the problems is that most prescription drugs don’t work. Bloomberg has a good article on one of the reason our drugs don’t work in their April 15 article, “Americans Are Taking Drugs That Don’t Work and Paying Billions.”

According to the article, “One ALS drug made $400 million in sales for its maker. It doesn’t work. A cancer treatment brought in $500 million. That one turned out to have no effect on survival. A blood cancer medication made nearly $850 million before being withdrawn for two of its uses. That drug had been linked to patient deaths years prior. All of them were allowed to be sold to Americans because of the US Food and Drug Administration’s drive to get new drugs to patients quickly — sometimes even before they’re done testing.”

Who approves these drugs? Physicians at the FDA. Why do the physicians do this? Because it is physicians, and only physicians, who can sell prescription drugs. It’s what they do. It’s how they make their money, and they make lots of money selling these drugs. Be a physician is the highest paid profession in the US. Physicians are in the business of selling drugs. They don’t make selling prevention, and they don’t make money selling you a healthy salad for dinner. Their business is to treat you with drugs once you’re sick. As the CDC writes, “Underutilization of preventive services is largely the result of an implementation gap rather than an information gap; in other words, providers do not prioritize preventive care services although they know that preventive services can reduce the incidence and burden of chronic diseases. A major reason the implementation gap exists is that financial incentives do not align with a focus on preventing chronic diseases. Currently, most providers, including hospitals and physicians, are paid to treat rather than to prevent disease.” 

And the physicians gatekeepers at the FDA, the physicians approving these drugs that don’t work, are often paid by the pharma companies to approve the drugs. Yes, physicians at the FDA are paid to approve the drugs. The newest trick that physicians use to make money selling drugs is to be paid by the drug company to approve the company’s drug after the approval process.

And practicing physicians, they’re on the take too. Billions of dollars are spent by pharma to induce physicians to prescribe their meds. As physicians have written, “Accepting industry money leads physicians to prescribe expensive, worthless drugs.” As these authors write, “A ban on industry payments to physicians may seem drastic, but it is the only appropriate response.” I’ll add, that ban must include practicing physicians and the physicians approving the drugs at the FDA. If you work for the FDA, you shouldn’t be allowed to then go to work for pharma, making millions of dollars a year as a payoff.