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The 84 Series

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Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

Just because you don’t understand why or how federal funds are being spent doesn’t mean they’re waste or fraud — especially if you’re too lazy or ideologically focused to ask questions about the nature of the spending in the first place.

I learned those lessons more than a decade ago when I covered a great program called the Golden Goose Awards, which recognizes federally funded research that often seemed trivial at the time it was funded but later yielded lifesaving science or commercially important technologies.

At the time federally funded researchers often found their projects mocked, trivialized, belittled, or under attack — in ways that almost seem quaint today as the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE team take a chainsaw and blowtorch to the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NOAA, USGS, and other federal agencies.

How many of those now-unfunded research projects could have protected us from climate change, pollution and toxic chemicals, or the extinction crisis?

We may never know the answer to that question, but a look at two of the most recent Golden Goose Award winners offers a clue:

A project about the red-cockaded woodpecker that revealed new ways to protect all birds.

An observation that “bright pink penguin poop appeared on satellite images” yielded a 40-year effort to track penguin populations (and all wildlife) from space.

You can find a lot more in past years’ award recipients, including a study of frog skin that has saved 50 million human lives and another frog study that revealed the nature of the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus.

“The value of federally funded research has been proven time and time again,” says Barry Toiv, vice president for public affairs at the Association of American Universities, one of the organizations sponsoring the Golden Goose Award. “Economists suggest that 50% of growth over the last several decades has been a result of innovation, much of which is in turn a result of federally funded research at American universities.”

Toiv says this research is important even though “it’s impossible to know where so much of it is going to lead. It’s basic research, mostly, and it may not have some end-result in mind when it takes place.”

Federally funded research is the “only place that you can take that kind of chance,” says Freeze. “Private industry can’t do it because they have to show that they’re working on something that will eventually yield a profit.” He notes that the lifesaving research being done at his own organization, a nonprofit, would probably not be conducted at all in the for-profit world.

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Reminder that the US military budget is larger than the military spending of the next nine largest countries combined. Over half goes to private defense contractors. This is the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of — on steroids

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Unthinkable evil. Sending innocent people to a life sentence in a foreign concentration camp should have ended careers. Resignations.

Instead, white MAGA rejoice. You will never hear a negative peep from anyone. 100% complicity.

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Wow, now there's a bot going around on Ao3 telling people that the "moderators" will delete works from "deprecated" fandoms and impose bans.

Fearmongering bullshit, but it's fearmongering bullshit that seems to be taking advantage of the recent spotlight series in order to trick authors into deleting their fics.

Just. Why.

What the hell does anyone get out of making these bots.

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it’s so weird misogyny has obviously always been there and it has always been bad but it seems to be once again hyper visible compared to even like the mid 2010s which was. not that long ago at all

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what are you waiting for? someone to grant you permission? the perfect and permanent emotion? a shooting star to magic away every problem you have or ever have had? alright, wait away then. but no one is going to live your life for you while you wait to become someone else

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This one? Ok, I won't post it.

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“If You Sit Back And Do Nothing, They Will Take It All.” - Sen. Sanders On America’s Oligarchy

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