What happens when you can’t even pretend that your theory still aligns with reality?

Here are two stories, one is out there and one is down here. First, the universe.

There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent…

At first, scientists expected this discrepancy to resolve as the data got better. But the problem has stubbornly persisted even as the data have gotten far more precise. And now new data from the Webb have exacerbated the problem. This trend suggests a flaw in the model, not in the data.

Two serious issues with the standard model of cosmology would be concerning enough. But the model has already been patched up numerous times over the past half century to better conform with the best available data — alterations that may well be necessary and correct, but which, in light of the problems we are now confronting, could strike a skeptic as a bit too convenient.

Speaking of flaws in the model back here on Earth.

“The deficit will basically double from 2022 to 2023,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “This should prompt a serious evaluation of federal policy going forward, though I worry it won’t.”

The surge in red ink has confounded many economists’ expectations. Typically, deficits contract when the economy grows, because businesses and consumers owe more in taxes and the government does not need to spend as much to protect those who have lost their job. Then deficits normally expand again in downturns, as those factors go into reverse. And yet the current surge in the deficit is coinciding with a period of unusually strong economic growth, amid historic lows in unemployment and robust corporate profits.

Pick your reality, either we have a robust economy or we don’t. And it’s all a Potemkin village.

Jason Furman, who served as a top economist in the Obama administration and is now an economics professor at Harvard, said the current jump in the deficit is only surpassed by “major crises,” such as World War II, the 2008 financial meltdown or the coronavirus pandemic. Only during these national catastrophes did the United States see deficit numbers this large as a share of the economy or this substantial an increase in the deficit, Furman said.

Those are valid analogies since much like WWII, a whole lot of the labor force vanished, the economy was transformed, jobs disappeared and shifted, and now we still have people coming back from the ‘war’.

But there’s no robust economy, there’s just a recovery from an artificial economic catastrophe in which major portions of the economy were shut down, wealth changed hands and incredible amounts of money were spent (much of which were actually stolen in one form or another) and are continuing to be spent.

Some people act like we’re not spending enough money on “taking care of people”. We are. But the money was spent on COVID social welfare that was only necessary because society was shut down. Our governments went ahead and did this, and then in the teeth of inflation, didn’t stop spending but just kept raising interest rates so we now have more expensive debt than ever accompanied by a ton of spending.

And the senile crook at the top keeps boasting how ‘Bidenomics’ worked.

“To see this in an economy with low unemployment is truly stunning. There’s never been anything like it,” Furman said. “A good and strong economy, with no new emergency spending — and yet a deficit like this. The fact that it is so big in one year makes you think it must be some weird freakish thing going on.”

The freakish thing is that everything ahead of “a deficit like this” is a stunning bunch of lies.

We don’t have a fantastic economy, we have a terrible economy that’s destroying lives and the country while the media and its allied lefty experts keep hyping while furrowing their brows and trying to understand why anyone thinks something might be wrong.