The whole thing is just a big straw man argument. Well, actually the piece is pretty incoherent and I found it hard to find a red thread through the musings on such diverse topics as WIMPs, pentaquarks and the functioning of drift chambers. But the core of it seems to be at she thinks that scientists are now sitting on massive piles of data, mine through it looking for any oddities and then jump on the chance to publish a discovery of a new physical phenomenon as soon as one is found.

I can't judge whether she is just ignorant or deliberately misleading (she claims to have worked in physics), but this is just not how experiments are done. You almost always start with a theoretical prediction by a new theory, and there is no lack of theories out there so it has to be a pretty good one that has plenty of justification to merit attention enough to invest the 10+ person-years of effort it typically takes to conduct a rigorous analysis of a chunk of data from a modern large scale scientific instrument. You carefully demonstrate in various side bands your ability to correctly model every background process and instrumental effect that could influence the measurement. After that, if the data very clearly favors the new prediction over the null hypothesis, you may publish the discovery in order to invite other scientists to confirm or refute it. This does not mean that you or your peers accept that the new theory is correct.

And this is all supposedly in support of the thesis that large experimental facilities are a waste of money, which is patently nonsensical. They have been estimated to pay for themselves in direct returns alone (training of students and researchers, spin-off applications to silicon sensors, cryo technology, vacuum technology, lasers, accelerators, computing, etc). And the long term importance of investments in fundamental research are incalculable. For perspective, remember that the electron was considered a "useless" discovery back in 1897.