— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2025I am reminded of the old "Golden Fleece Award":
The Golden Fleece Award (1975–1988) was a tongue-in-cheek award given to public officials in the United States for squandering public money....
One man controlled this award: Senator William Proxmire. His idea of what sounded stupid ruled. You had to be careful about how your research project looked, at first glance, to a politician who wanted to make a general point about out-of-control federal spending.
In his 2014 book Creativity, Inc., Pixar President Ed Catmull wrote of the "chilling effect on research" the Golden Fleece Award exerted. He argued that when thousands of research projects are funded, some have measurable, positive impacts and others don't. It is not possible to predict what the results of every research project will be or whether they will have value. Catmull further argued that failure in research is essential and that fear of failure would distort the way researchers choose projects, which would ultimately impede progress....
Among the winners:
• National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded project by psychologist Harris Rubin for $121,000, on developing "some objective evidence concerning marijuana's effect on sexual arousal by exposing groups of male pot-smokers to pornographic films and measuring their responses by means of sensors attached to their penises".
• National Science Foundation for spending $103,000 to compare aggressiveness in sun fish that drink tequila as opposed to gin.
• National Institute for Mental Health for spending $97,000 to study, among other things, what went on in a Peruvian brothel; the researchers said they made repeated visits in the interests of accuracy.
• Office of Education for spending $219,592 in a "curriculum package" to teach college students how to watch television.
• United States Department of the Army for a $6,000 study on how to buy Worcestershire sauce in 1981.
• United States Department of Commerce (Economic Development Administration) for spending $20,000 to build a 10-story replica of the Great Wall of China in Bedford, Indiana. Begun in 1979, the money proved insufficient and the site is currently abandoned....
But Proxmire was only wielding his own expression — mockery. Unlike one Senator from Wisconsin, Musk has real power.
ADDED: According to Lead Stories:
Is the U.S. government spending money on the "National Pillow Fluffing Initiative," the "Bureau of Elevator Music Standards," the "National Velcro Noise Study," the "Program of Ice Cube Uniformity," the "American Cloud Watching Fund," the "Federal Kazoo Orchestra Grant" and the "Federal Bureau of Traffic Cone Counting"? No, that's not true: All these supposed expenses originated in a comedy skit by TikTok creator Read Choi who pretended these were all discovered by DOGE. The original video was labeled a skit, a meme and a sketch in the description and used the LOL hashtag.
But Elon Musk passed it on — and made if far more conspicuous — without labelling it comedy, presumably because he wanted to say — as my post title indicates — you really don't know if maybe these things could be real.
I was certainly ready to speculate that pillow fluffing might be a legitimate object of scientific study — something to do with dust mites and lung ailments, maybe, or neck pain.
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98 comments:
If you don't have an account and try to use the web, it is actually difficult to use Twitter these days to read someone's feed.
Yes, I can access an Elon Musk feed, but it's mostly from 2022. One single tweet from 2025 when I look.
Sea change.
@Mark I know, because I don't sign in to X on my iPhone, so I see what happens. I'm trying to remember to include the whole quote or the whole image or video. You don't need to be signed into X to see an play the video in this post or to see the image in the previous post. If I thought blogging things on X were creating blank spots on this blog, I wouldn't do it.
Is it "sign in to X" or "sign into X"? I see I used both. I think "in to" is better because "sign in" is a verb phrase and "to" is off on its own, being a fully free preposition.
"United States Department of the Army for a $6,000 study on how to buy Worcestershire sauce in 1981."
What's the source for that? Is that the exact wording, or is it "enhanced" for effect? And what interest does the Army have in condiments?
How to buy, and in finding it in the supermarket, carry it to the checkout lane, counting out the currency, etc. Or is it the connoisseur's "how", as in telling the authentic sauce from the cheap knock-off?
In addition to a Great Wall, Bedford also tried to construct an Egyptian pyramid. That's in ruins as well
typo alert: "as in finding it in the supermarket."
it's sign on to .. just like it is log on to
I find the fact the DOGE is publishing their talking points behind a paywall confirms that they are not serious people, like with Politico this is just an attempt to force people to buy subscriptions.
Except this time its giving money to the guy who is in the government directly and making the decision to publish their work on their personal private platform.
Or perhaps they were looking at commodities purchasing in the kind of bulk that the Army would buy, and Worcestershire sauce was used as a case study.
People know in a vague general sort of way that government gives a lot of money to a lot of projects government shouldn’t be funding, but this is the first time we get to see an actual list of the most ridiculous ones and even the most cynical among us will be shocked by what we learn.
This isn’t about research failure. This about research that’s not needed or at least not federally funded. Yeah, I like to fluff my pillows, but I don’t need the federal government to fund it. I especially don’t want the federal government to tell me how to do it such that it satisfies the government. The latter is where we are now because of funding this nonsense. Federal researchers say you must wear a mask. Federal researchers say there are multiple genders. Federal researchers say men don’t have a particular advantage over women in sports. Federal researchers say the climate is warming because you cook on a gas stove.
"And what interest does the Army have in condiments?"
I read that the Defense Department spends $100 million a year on sushi — am I dreaming??? — so I think the Army needs to study how it sources the massive quantities of food it serves. Maybe you save a lot on meat if you have good ketchup.
"United States Department of Commerce (Economic Development Administration) for spending $20,000 to build a 10-story replica of the Great Wall of China in Bedford, Indiana."
What the bloody fuck? Before spending two dollars, let alone twenty thousand, didn't anybody bother to check a few Great Wall facts, such as the average height of that barrier is 7.8 meters, reaching a maximum of 14 meters in a some places. Nowhere is it 10 stories tall. (Or is that 10 stories reckoned horizontally?)
The one that got all the play from that era was the $600 toilet seat for a Pentagon airplane. It’s now obvious that the LA Times and the Washington Post wrote about it because it embarrassed Ronald Reagan, who wanted to increase military spending.
It is difficult to reconcile the "how" in that item with tommy esquire's generous interpretation.
Some of this stuff does have logic to it when you consider that they had 781K people in hundreds of locations in 1981 (historyinpieces.com). With inflation adjusted to 2024, $6K is now worth $21K per USInflationCalculator.com. This would cover the salary of a researcher and overhead for perhaps 2 or 3 months.
I'm guessing Army buys condiments in huge shipments and may have struggled in with a standard item. This project may have been a logistics review: finding suppliers, determining quality, determining shipping costs, determining measures required to prevent container leakage and breakage, and determining the distribution process.
Boring stuff is the overlooked foundation of the military -- consider the old cliche: Amateurs talk about tactics and strategy while professionals talk about logistics and supply lines.
The $600 toilet seat and many other absurdities were used to disguise many so-called "black projects", such as the advanced 2nd and 3rd generation stealth technologies.
No, your not dreaming, or I am as well. Sushi? Just imagine what they're paying for sashimi.
I like how the TikTok maker uses the look left, look right camera technique invented by Swedish film director David Sjöström over 100 years ago.This was used in his silent classic "The Phantom Carriage" (1921). The bit about the film cut technique is in the director's cut DVD.
@Mark: Everything coming from Trump and DOGE right now is an initial poker hand with psychological "shock and awe" and a simple bluff. Their real work/negotiation happens with lawsuits, court rulings, and when Congress addresses the budget and/or "big beautiful bill" around March.
Currently peer reviewed science is currently suffering from a dearth of replication; there is really no incentive to replicate a study. So out of a sense of altruism, I aim to replicate the following:
• National Institute for Mental Health for spending $97,000 to study, among other things, what went on in a Peruvian brothel; the researchers said they made repeated visits in the interests of accuracy.
As I noted above, the wording is suspect -- perhaps chosen to promote the most adverse interpretation.
Might be research for a potential government contract. "Is it significantly cheaper to buy in bulk from a central supplier, or do we just let individual facilities buy what they want?"
@Mark: No one cares what you think. You are not a serious person.
Richard Feynman was onto this shit many decades ago.
@Quaestor: Military "pay" involves a mix of (modest) cash, housing, food, and lifelong benefits (e.g., VA healthcare and veteran's preference jobs). The cost of sushi and food items is a mere footnote versus the massive, massive, massive costs of the lifelong benefits. Those who spend a portion of their careers on active duty become a budgetary cost, and perhaps an unneeded fish-out-of-water federal employee, for several decades after that.
I don't have an account on X because it's too much of a time sink, but I can still see things like the nearly $40 million dollars that we gave to that Chinese researcher in Wuhan who was the first victim of COVID and whom we paid all of that money to do experiments on coronaviruses that were illegal in the United States. Of course at the direction of Fauci, whose blanket pardon covers Fauci's decision to violate the law by fiddling with definitions, even as uncounted millions have died as a result of his reckless act.
So what I think Mark is mad about is the messenger, and what is making him mad is that this stuff is becoming known. Or that's what's making the people who curate Mark's news so carefully mad. Can't have anybody outside the system of payoffs by USAID!
Agree with gilbar: it's onto
Be careful what you ask for -- some of the health-oriented research on prostitution would have you staring at infected hoo-haws and dirty stinky beds for days on end. Some of the crime and social service research would focus on pimps, trafficking, police corruption, and beatings. Never underestimate the power of professional researchers to turn topics into...policy and intellectual minutiae or...yuck...
This is the kind of stuff Mark doesn't like us to see:
1️⃣ Gov-funded NGO gets a USAID grant for something vague like “strengthening education.”
2️⃣ That NGO dumps millions into a DAF (Donor-Advised Fund).
3️⃣ The DAF isn’t required to disclose what the NGO told them to do with the money.
4️⃣ But somehow, every hyperpolitical nonprofit with a sketchy agenda ends up getting funded.
This is from a guy "data republican(small r)" who has been combing through the data released.
Are the programs real, or are they not? Who cares? The money's real or as near as damn it.
I don’t have an X account either, but I see all I have to do is log on with the same google id I have to access Althouse comments, so the claim that X commentary is behind a paywall is disinformation.
Come off it, Enigma. Since their pay is so modest, don't you supposed they'd rather have the cash equivalent rather than a meager slab of rice topped with a meager slice of nigiri?
Blowing smoke doesn't work anymore.
The latest outrage. (hat tip Instapundit)
Swift 's Projectors. If you like reading and ideas, read Gulliver's Travels before you die.
And this. (from my X feed)
Quaestor: Here is Pew's "smoke" for you to consider. Scoll down to the heat map showing agency size. See the largest one, the Veteran's Administration with 486K employees. This is a direct cost of veterans post-duty benefits. Play around in the margins and worry about food all you like -- it's not going to balance the budget.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/
Just head over to the supermarket? If only! When the Army or any other branch of the military needs to buy something, there's a "process" that needs to be followed. See here:
https://totalmilitaryinsight.com/army-procurement-process/
$6,000 for a tutorial on how to navigate this system might actually be quite the bargain!
X uses the same reasoning that Facebook and Instagram use: you need to sign up for full access. Email address equals access
Tequila v. Gin. I’ll take tequila.
@Enigma: "Play around in the margins and worry about [insert topic being investigated] all you like -- it's not going to balance the budget."
This is the battle-cry the corrupt roll out every time their profligate antics are exposed.
You certainly can't fault the folks in Bedford for thinking small, can you?
(Previous comment deleted for really bad typo)
Enigma, you must be an AM drunk. Nobody cares about your pointless links.
The great irony is that Musk is engaged in this “efficiency” effort in order to save enough taxpayer money to pay for his dream of sending a manned spaceship to Mars. All the little boondoggles will pay for his big boondoggle, so there will be no net savings.
I'll take "Things To Do With Limestone" for $500.
If they had built a great wall in Bedford, someone would have attached a basketball hoop to it. Then, the great shooters that came out of Lawrence County as a result would still remain unrecruited miles up the road and wind up putting up 20 on my Hoosiers in the first five minutes. But I digress...
When nothing like this happens, will you admit you were incorrect?
My dad was working at Coast Guard HQ in the mid 70s when they wanted to close a barely used (1-2 incidents a year) station in Wisconsin to save money. Proxmire objected, so it didn't happen. Hypocrite.
According to Musk, Starlink will fund his mission to Mars. But you do you.
My thinking is that the Biden Administration giving Politico tens of millions of dollars, and then two reporters quit because their reporting on Biden's corruption in Ukraine were killed by editors, is the kind of story where certain people might like to shoot the messenger before it gets too widely spread, and might be the reason that Musk is coming under so much attack.
Our deficit is in the trillions, we are risking an economic collapse like what happened to the Western Roman Empire, hyperinflation, etc, and Lefty Charles is worried about us finding out about this looting of the treasury because it hurts the Democrats election prospects.
Lefty Charles just assumes that donors to politicians are going to get paid off in a big way. Every accusation is a confession, isn't it.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887257971580633095
+1 to the Mouse that Roared.
I'm a former NASA contractor that left as the Space Shuttle Program ended. That program ended to pay for what was the Constellation, and now is Artemis. That was 13.5 years ago with an expectation to have spent $93 billion by the end of this year. To date, there has been one flight. The second flight that was scheduled for last year is now not expected to fly this year.
Did some of Artemis fund Starship? Yes. But Starship was just supposed to be the lander for Artemis. Starship is actually bigger than the Orion capsule and service module. And while both have a heatshield problem right now, one has a flight test program that will work through those problems likely by the end of this year. And only one is designed from the beginning to be reuseable. Since most of Starship is privately funded, we don't know the full budget of development to date, but estimates are it has been no more than $10 billion total for the orbiter and launch booster, with a spend rate announced by Elon Musk of $2 billion a year, which resulted in 5 flights with 2 boosters fully recovered. SLS will never recover any of its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stages.
Interesting “talking point”, mark. /sarc
For the edification of those who refuse to click on X, narciso linked to a tweet, retweeted by Musk, but not created by him, that shows that Chelsea Clinton raked in $84 million dollars from USAID.
If you aren't wondering if it is at all possible that you are being urged to hate Musk is because they don't want you reading stuff like that, you are maybe too unsophisticated, shall we put it, to even be posting here.
“This is the battle-cry the corrupt roll out every time their profligate antics are exposed.“
So… he’s a fed?
"You're welcome." Great riff.
All prepositions deserve full freedom!
Mark: I find the fact the DOGE is publishing their talking points behind a paywall confirms that they are not serious people
One of the funniest things about Mark's comment here is that we all learned that Biden had withdrawn his 2024 candidacy from his statement on X. X is also where we first learned that Biden had pardoned his son. These were much bigger stories than anything Trump is doing, especially since these announcements were initially denied by official White House communications until the moment they were announced on X. Trump and Musk announced what they were going to do with DOGE during the campaign. That they are doing it is only a surprise because most politicians never follow through on campaign promises.
I can see investigating the health issues involved in sex work. But in PERU? If nothing else, attitudes and practices are likely to be different there. They couldn't find any brothels here in the US? This sounds more like those sex junkets to Thailand (involving minors) that were in the news a few years back.
US media used to care about fleecing. Now - they are all on the democrat party script.
& the US still cannot find enough money to take care of our VETS.
I've never paid for X, Mark. You can make a free account.
Same here. Sure, you can purchase a premium account (blue checkmark?) but it isn't necessary to read posts on X.
Just like all lefties, pulling stuff out of your rear end.
I'm browsing the recipient list at your link, and wondering:
Why is there no wailing and garment rending from the usual suspects, about the total disregard for the separation of church and state?
Oh. OK, I understand. Sorry for asking.
Why does Google need my birth date when I try to sign on to X?
NIH actually studied whether elephants pissing in waterholes caused crocodile tears! Naw, I’m making that up, but with all they’ve found, the odds against it are not zero.
"Paywall"? Twitter is free
I would guess that the $100 million in sushi is for DOD's commissaries (i.e., supermarkets).
I'm sure the same left wing spending corruption is going on in Madison, WI wasting resources and money provided by Wisconsin's tax paying citizens.
The easiest thing to access on X is Elon Musk's feed. Anybody's feed is easy to access. Only Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble would have difficulty.
DOGE information and Musk's feed are NOT behind the paywall. Even GROK AI is available for free on X.
And it appears that Politico and the AP, among others, were beneficiaries of the USAID grift, so it's no wonder.
"@Enigma: "Play around in the margins and worry about [insert topic being investigated] all you like -- it's not going to balance the budget."
This is the battle-cry the corrupt roll out every time their profligate antics are exposed."
If the expense amounts are so small they don't really matter, then let's eliminate them. Shouldn't be a problem for anybody. Right?
Mark - best to stay clueless and propagandized by the corrupt left. Good boi.
It doesn't. You can make one up when you create a google id.
My recollection is that there was a little/some/much resentment of Proxmire among scientists and university people. As ridiculous as some of the grants were, they didn't want the public questioning anything about the process.
Question for AI: Was "x" also Senator Proxmire's favorite letter or was he too adult to have a favorite letter?
LOL
So pathetic.
Hey, we get it. You predicted X would die years ago and instead X has recouped the initial value dip and returned to profitability all while rewriting the entire base code in parallel to launching new capabilities every week and launching new apps all over the place...after firing 6,500 of 8000 employees.
All things Dumb Lefty Mark declared impossible...so he is reduced to these sorts of sad weak tea comments.
The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate.
Here’s a true asshole take:
https://patterico.com/2025/02/05/theres-a-hole-in-the-budget-dear-liza/
Can confirm that there is a sushi station at my local commissary.
He cancelled me after one post
Proxmire came and spoke to our class once (sometime in the '70s). I think maybe even then I had the same issues with his Fleece awards -- i.e., just because he thinks something is ridiculous doesn't mean it is.
The school I went to offered funding to various clubs on campus. A group of friends tried forming an epicurean club that was to study the food served in the diverse ethnic restaurants in town. We were turned down. We should've applied for a federal grant.
boatbuilder asked…
“Why does Google need my birth date when I try to sign on to X?”
Never asked me. Are you trying to access age-restricted content?
X is doing the work Big Media won't do. That's where you can see what was going on USAID -- not your local station. Not the NYT WaPo axis.
Left Bank is as dumb as gadfly when it comes to tech, and as dumb as Dumb Lefty Mark on everything else.
NASA has already estimated SpaceX has saved NASA $40billion in launch costs.
Left Bank's ignorance is only exceeded by his willingness to lie for team dem.
Not really. The $600 toilet seat is the result of allocating project overhead costs to each component in a contract divided by an initially limited production run. As production ramps the unit price goes down because all the development engineering is front-loaded into the contracts for the prototypes and early production runs. (This is why the airplane manufacturers really want export sales.) The unit cost of an F35 in 2007 was over 200 million but after a decade of production that had been cut in half. (Sustainment projections are another matter.)
He’s California Deep State, narciso. Whatever hair plugs fatman Jonah Goldberg says, he listens and jumps.
It took about 10 seconds to find this.
Which is a lot less time than it would have taken to write a comment bitching about the lack of data on the question.
You'll always have BlueSky.
Hey, Mark. Jump off a building, OK? It will all become clear to you on the way down. For added enlightenment, choose a really, really tall one.
The only Golden Fleece award I actually remember was about a study of the "sex lives of mosquitoes". Which, of course, is vital to understand if you want to suppress mosquito populations.
Proxmire was flinging " stray voltage" around; it was mostly a PR stunt.
Is it "sign in to X" or "sign into X"? I see I used both. I think "in to" is better because "sign in" is a verb phrase and "to" is off on its own, being a fully free preposition.
"Sign-in into your account" is incorrect because "sign-in" is a noun or adjective, not a verb. The correct options are:
✅ "Sign in to your account" (verb phrase – correct for logging in)
✅ "Sign-in process for your account" (noun phrase – correct for describing the process)
❌ "Sign-in into your account" (incorrect – redundant use of "in" and "into")
Explanation:
"Sign in" (verb) → "Sign in to your account."
"Sign-in" (noun/adjective) → "The sign-in page."
The key mistake in "sign-in into your account" is using "sign-in" as a noun but following it with "into," which doesn't make sense grammatically. If you need a verb, drop the hyphen: "Sign in to your account."
The correct form is "sign in to your account," not "sign into your account."
Explanation:
"Sign in" is a phrasal verb (meaning to log in), and when you specify a destination (like an account), you need "to":
✅ "Sign in to your account." (Correct)
❌ "Sign into your account." (Incorrect)
"Into" implies movement inside something physically, which doesn't fit well with "sign in."
A good comparison:
✅ "Log in to your account." (Correct)
❌ "Log into your account." (Incorrect for the same reason)
If you were physically signing something (like a contract), "sign into" could work:
✅ "She signed into the guestbook." (Correct because it refers to writing inside something)
But for digital access, stick with "sign in to."
/chatGPT
I thought the routine was very well done. Although the alleged programs were clearly satire . . . some of them sounded like they could be real.
" a barely used (1-2 incidents a year) station in Wisconsin " ...
Proxmire once explained his own priorities with an example I believe generalizes. Suppose the Federal Government proposes to send rockets to the moon to mine Green Cheese, bring it back to Earth, and feed it to Welfare recipients Of course he would vote against the very stupid idea. BUT if it passed, Proxmire would point out that Wisconsin leads the world in cheese processing and technology -- keeping it clean, portioning it out, wrapping for handling, transport while keeping it fresh, a dozen things Wisconsin does better than anyone else anywhere. SO, he would introduce legislation to direct NASA and the Green Cheese Mining Corporation build and support processing factories, railroad terminals, refrigerated storage facilities ... all in his state in support of jobs for his constituents. Doing stupid things, in the service of his voters.
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