Unbelievable cruelty being inflicted across the globe

This article from ProPublica describes the chaos that has fallen upon all the aid groups that were providing life-saving humanitarian services to people around the world as a result of the Trump administration’s executive orders to stop everything at once.

On Friday morning, the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.

They chose the children.

In spite of the order, they will keep their facilities open for as long as they can, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. The people requested anonymity for fear that the administration might target their group for reprisals. Trump’s order also meant they would stop receiving new, previously approved funds to cover salaries, IV bags and other supplies. They said it’s a matter of days, not weeks, before they run out.

American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded.
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Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025)

The singer and actress has died at the age of 78.

I only know of only one song by her but it is one that I like a lot, mainly because of the musical arrangement with the English horn (a member of the oboe family) that accentuates the plaintiveness of her vocals. It is As Tears Go By, released in 1964, when she was just 17 years old.

The song was composed by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Andrew Long Oldham, who was the manager of the Rolling Stones. In 1965 the band released their own version of the song with the English horn being replaced by guitar but still capturing the plaintiveness of the melody. Both versions used an acoustic 12-string guitar.

Interestingly, while the song evokes the feeling of an old person looking back on life, at that time Faithfull was just 17 and Jagger and Richards just 20.

What happened to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi?

I used to read and support both of them (I used to send money to Greenwald back at the beginning when he was a mere blogger) but as many observers have noted, they seem to have taken a turn to the right and I no longer seek them out. Will Solomon writes that a new book Owned by Eoin Higgins asserts that their shift is part of a larger program by tech billionaires like Mark Andreesen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk to buy the loudest voices on the left and right. (The article is behind a paywall so I’ll give just brief excerpts.)

Higgins has done a sort of service for those of us who have watched Greenwald and Taibbi in disbelief, as they’ve contorted themselves into more and more ridiculous positions in obvious deference to wealth and power—particularly wealth and power in the tech sector—and aligned themselves with an ascendant right. Both have repeatedly justified the transformation (a transformation that, to varying degrees, they also deny, instead blaming shifts in liberal culture) under the guise of rejecting corporate censorship and hegemonic liberalism, surfing the same wave of anti–cancel culture hysteria that has degraded public conversation more generally and simplified potentially meaningful debates around power and the consolidation of media into a more easily digestible pill of “liberal elites are muffling conservative voices.” And, of course, both men have gotten very rich doing it.
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Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?

I do not use TikTok. I have also stopped using Twitter/X. I closed my Facebook account a long time ago, much to the chagrin of some friends who use it to advertise events and get-togethers that they think I would be interested in. When asked by them why I limit myself this way, I tell them that I dislike the ethics of Facebook and its parent company Meta and that I am not at all worried about the phenomenon of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). If I miss an event because it was only announced on Facebook, it does not bother me. I know what things I value and find ways to learn about them.

I do use the internet a great deal but when it comes to communicating with other people, email and text messages are about it. Even there, I avoid group chats and emails because they often degenerate into squabbles that I think are petty and have no interest in.
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Trump is nuts: Example #453

Today Trump said on his social media platform the following:

The military entered California and turned on the water to the state? We didn’t have any water before? Is there some spigot that can be used to turn water on and off to California? Where is this spigot and where is the pipe that. carries the water? And who is in charge of it that they had to be ordered by the military to turn it on? What the hell is Trump talking about?

As Kevin Drum writes:

This is beyond weird. It’s hallucinatory. And even if it were somehow true that the Army TURNED ON THE WATER, California doesn’t get any water from the Pacific Northwest or beyond. We get it from our very own Sierra Nevadas.

Is Trump really and truly losing it? Or does he figure he can just say anything he wants for the rubes? Or what?

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New DeepSeek AI chatbot challenges other chatbots and US monopolies

A new AI chatbot called Deep Seek created by Chinese investors has been released and sent shock waves through the US AI industry because it seems to be able to do all that the other chatbots can do (and perhaps more) for much lower cost and with less sophisticated chips.

Investors punished global tech stocks on Monday after the emergence of a Chinese chatbot competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DeepSeek, raised doubts about the sustainability of the US artificial intelligence boom.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index in New York opened lower after investors digested the implications of the latest AI model developed by the startup DeepSeek.

Nvidia, the most valuable listed company in the US and a leading maker of the computer chips that power AI models, lost more than $400bn (£321bn) in stock market value in early trading as its shares declined 13.6%, while Microsoft shed $130bn and Google’s parent, Alphabet, declined by $80bn.

Nvidia’s fall – which wiped about $465bn off its value, was the biggest in US stock market history, according to Bloomberg.
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Trump’s obsession with ending birthright citizenship

Birthright citizenship is the right that grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the US, irrespective of the status of their parentage. Trump issued an executive order cancelling birthright citizenship for any child born after February 19, 2025 to anyone other than US citizens or permanent residents. This order was immediately challenged by multiple states and in the first hearing on it, a federal judge in Seattle immediately suspended the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is,” U.S. District Judge John Coughenour told a Justice Department attorney. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Thursday’s decision prevents the Trump administration from taking steps to implement the executive order for 14 days. In the meantime, the parties will submit further arguments about the merits of Trump’s order. Coughenour scheduled a hearing on Feb. 6 to decide whether to block it long term as the case proceeds.

Coughenour, 84, a Ronald Reagan appointee who was nominated to the federal bench in 1981, grilled the DOJ attorney, Brett Shumate, asking whether Shumate personally believed the order was constitutional.

“I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order,” he added.
….

The U.S. is among about 30 countries where birthright citizenship — the principle of jus soli or “right of the soil” — is applied. Most are in the Americas, and Canada and Mexico are among them.

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20th anniversary of this blog

Today marks the 20th anniversary of my blogging. I started in 2005 but that was on the platform created by my university to encourage people to start using this new method for disseminating their opinions and research. The support people there helped and encouraged me as I tentatively started doing it. At that time, blogging was considered not quite respectable and some academics shied away from using it or blogged under pseudonyms so that their peers would not look. down on them.

That view has definitely changed dramatically over the last twenty years.

I switched over to this site on FreeThoughtBlogs in 2012.

Blogging takes time away from other things but it has its own rewards. I get a lot of useful tips and information from commenters and as well as in private communications. The blog also serves as a useful repository of data for me. Often, when I am thinking of something, I recall that I blogged about it before and can search easily on the site and get back all the data and links that I had used without having to scour the internet again.

It also allows me to think ideas through while they are still unformed and thus refine them. One of my books God vs. Darwin grew out of an extended series of blog posts and some of ideas in my last book The Great Paradox of Science first got aired here.

So thanks for reading!

What is Vladimir Putin’s game?

Russia’s president has said that Trump was right when he claimed that the Ukraine war would never have happened if Trump had been in office. He also supported the idea that the 2020 elections was stolen.

In an interview with Russian state television, Putin praised Trump as a “clever and pragmatic man” who is focused on U.S. interests.

“We always had a business-like, pragmatic but also trusting relationship with the current U.S. president,” Putin said. “I couldn’t disagree with him that if he had been president, if they hadn’t stolen victory from him in 2020, the crisis that emerged in Ukraine in 2022 could have been avoided.”

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The anti-science attacks begin

One of the things that has made the US a leader in the global economy is the high quality of its science research. The infrastructure that has been set up to promote science, with organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation giving out grants to scientists or, in the case of the NIH, also doing research doing research internally, has resulted in prospective students and researchers from around the world flocking to the US. That has changed more recently with China luring foreign scientists with promises of greater access to research funds. India too has been making attempts to have scientists return to that country.

But the moves by the Trump administration may threaten US dominance much more than the efforts of those countries to attract scientists away.
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