As of today, I am officially furloughed without pay since the NIH is officially closed and nonessential employees like myself are barred from working without pay by the Antideficiency Act of 1884. However, given that blogging is not considered an official duty, I can continue to post to Scientific Clearing House. Those who are not up on American politics may be wondering why the US government has shutdown. The reason is that the US fiscal year begins on Oct 1 and according to the the US Constitution, only Congress can appropriate funds for the functioning of government and they did not pass a budget for the new fiscal year by midnight of September 30. Actually, Congress has not passed a budget on time in recent years but has passed Continuing Resolutions that to keep the government going. So why have they not passed a budget or a CR this year? Well, currently the US government is divided with the Democratic party controlling the Senate and Presidency and the Republican party controlling the House of Representatives. All three entities must agree for a law to pass. Three years ago, the Democrats controlled the Congress, which includes both the House and Senate, and passed the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which the President signed into law. The Republicans took control of the House in 2011 and have been trying to repeal the ACA ever since but have been stopped by the Senate. This year they decided to try a new tactic, which was to pass a budget that withholds funding for the ACA. The Senate did not agree, passed a budget with the ACA and sent it back to the House, which then took out funding for the ACA again with some modifications and sent it back. This went on back and forth without converging to an agreement and thus we are closed today.
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Scientific Clearing House 
maybe this is ‘trolling’, but some of us have been on furlough for years. (i guess a walmart is coming up the street, and i think they even help you apply for food stamps because you aren’t worth 8$/hr, much less 12.50—-to get that, as pointed out by gray (mayor of a small inconspicuous town most known for the potomac river), you have to work hard—such as run a fake campaign to draw votes from the competition.(via arrow/condorcet/brams/saari etc voting theorems).
one could ask, given the issue over ‘core standards’ in education and people like diane ravitch (or say, william bennet under ronald (mcdonald bonzos for bonzai) reagen—who wrote the ‘book of virtues’ and made millions off his original plagiarisms) involved in that, exactly how do these people make it up to capital hill? who certified them? quite a few have ‘good degrees’. (perhaps should be a 1st degree charge).
anyway, who needs NIH or NIMH? Frederick Goodwin (psychiatry, GWU, was really valuable of course, to the pharamceutical industry). Most reasonable people now turn to Candace Pert (once at NIH), Deepak Chopra, and Gary Null (AIDS is a hoax), religion and conspiracy theory (also called intelligent deism, or anthropomorphic hypothesis (barrow)—the universe is finely tuned in, turned off, and on, and f-kd up..
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