Why I blog

Today is the 21st anniversary of the beginning of my blogging. I originally started doing so on this day in 2005 on the platform that had been started by my university and then in 2012 was invited to join the FreethoughtBlogs collective and have been here ever since. When I started, blogging was new and it was considered to be slightly infra dig for academics to engage in it, a comedown from the forms in which they usually expressed their ideas, such as journal papers, magazine articles, and newspaper op-eds. In fact, a faculty colleague of mine in my university published his blog anonymously, out of embarrassment as to what his peers might think. But that feeling soon dissipated as the value of this form became apparent, enabling as it did the ability to very rapidly express one’s scholarly views on the news of the day. More and more faculty started blogging and some found their visibility increasing by leaps and bounds and being sought after by the media.

But as some have pointed out, blogging seems to be falling out of favor. This is partly because the audience has shifted to social media platforms that enable hot takes on the news to be disseminated even more quickly. However, those forms tend to require very short snippets mostly in the form of videos and hence are not really suitable for any thoughtful exposition on a topic, and thus not that appealing to academics.
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Incompetence all the way down

As others have pointed out, one of the key differences between the first Trump administration and the current iteration is that in the first one, he was willing to appoint people who were acceptable to the Republican party establishment to key positions. Of course, he then got tired of those who were not totally supportive of his crackpot ideas and fired them or they left, but by and large he kept intact the senior-level professional cadres, the ones who have the institutional memories, are aware of the norms under which their institutions operate, and essentially keep the wheels of government rolling.

But after he lost the 2020 election, Trump began his paranoid delusions that the entire government was filled with people who opposed him and were the ones who brought him down, going so far as to postulate the existence of a ‘deep state’ that actually stole the election from him. He targeted in particular the department of justice, falsely claiming that Joe Biden had ‘weaponized’ the institution to target him and his supporters, by investigating him and prosecuting the members of the violent mob that attacked the Capital building on January 6th, 2021 at his instigation.

So this time around, Trump has forced out of office any career person whom he did not feel was sufficiently loyal to him to do his bidding and put in place stooges and sycophants even if they were not qualified and barely knew what their job entailed. While this happened everywhere, the department of justice has been the place where the incompetence has been revealed the most. While so much attention has been focused on the mess that Trump is creating at a high level, that can shield the fact of messes further down.
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This is the person they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to?

I do not follow very much the Nobel Peace Prize, seeing it as a highly over-rated award but some people still view it highly, most notably the idiot president of the US. So I did not know much about this year’s winner Maria Corina Machado other than that she was a right wing opposition leader in Venezuela. The mainstream media in the US did not go into many details of her life.

But then her sucking up to Trump was truly nauseating and I began to wonder exactly what her background was. Nuvpreet Kalra has taken a deep dive into Machado’s life and she seems to be much worse than I thought, in that rather than being a doughty fighter for the people of the opposition, she seems to be just another member of the oligarchy, using popular movements to serve the interests of the wealthy including her own.
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Trump forced to back down on Greenland threats

After boasting that he would compel Europe to give him Greenland or impose tariffs on them, even implying a willingness to use force if necessary,Trump caved. First Trump said that he would not use force, then said that he would not impose the tariffs because he had arrived at some kind of deal. That turns out be (no surprise) a lie.

Donald Trump has walked back his threat to impose sweeping US tariffs on eight European countries, claiming he had agreed “the framework of a future deal” on Greenland at the same time a Danish lawmaker called the deal “not real”.

Four days after vowing to introduce steep import duties on a string of US allies over their support for Greenland’s continued status as an autonomous Danish territory, the president backed down.
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Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, a Greenlandic member of the Danish parliament, wrote on Facebook Wednesday night that, despite Trump’s claim of having struck an agreement over her homeland with Nato, the military alliance has no mandate to negotiate anything about Greenland. “Nothing about us, without us,” she wrote.

Amid rumors that a mineral deal might have been discussed by Trump and Rutte in Davos, Chemnitz Larsen called the idea that Nato should have anything to say about Greenland’s sovereignty or minerals “completely out of the question”.

Sascha Faxe, a member of Denmark’s parliament, said in an interview with Sky News on Wednesday evening, that the deal Trump claims to have struck with Nato over Greenland is “not real”.

“The thing is, there can’t be a deal without having Greenland as part of the negotiations, first of all,” Faxe said.

She went on to reference Chemnitz Larsen’s earlier comments, saying: “I have heard from the Greenlanders that I know – so we have a Greenlandic MP in Denmark – and she’s very clear that this is not a prerogative of Rutte and Nato; they can’t trade the underground in Greenland, or Greenlandic security without Greenlanders being part of it.

“And they are very clear: Greenland is not for sale, they are not up for negotiations,” Faxe added. “So it’s not real negotiations, it’s two men who have had a conversation,” she said. “It’s definitely not a deal.”

This shows that when the Europeans stand firm together, Trump becomes a paper tiger.

His climbdown on tariffs came hours after the European parliament suspended indefinitely the ratification of the US-EU tariff deal sealed last summer, in a move that showed politicians were, for the first time, willing to face Trump down.

When Trump says that he has a ‘framework’ or ‘concept’ of deal, it means that he has nothing and are words designed to hide a humiliating retreat. He is living up to the epithet given him of being ‘TACO’ where TACO stands for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’.

The weak link for Europe seems to be NATO secretary general Mark Rutte who looks eager to appease Trump and acts like he can unilaterally negotiate on behalf of NATO. I suspect that the conversation that he had with Trump where Trump said that they had arrived at a deal was specifically designed to allow Trump to try and save face.

The relative decline of research universities in the US

The New York Times had an article that has set off alarms in higher education circles in the US that, according to some global rankings, China’s universities are rapidly advancing the amount and quality of their scientific research output, leaving US universities behind.

Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.

Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.

Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
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According to Mark Neijssel, director of services for the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden rankings take into account papers and citations contained in the Web of Science, a database set of academic publications which is owned by Clarivate, a data and analytics company. Thousands of academic journals are represented in the databases, many of which are highly specialized, he said.

The research output of Harvard and other US universities has not declined. It has grown but the Chinese universities are growing faster. This is because China has put great emphasis on scientific research, seeing it as the foundation of its technological base for its growth as a world power.
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Trump may be insane. Really.

[UPDATE: Arizona senator Ruben Gallego says that he thinks Trump is literally insane and that “Everyone needs to stop pretending this is rational.” We need to encourage more people to say this.]

Trump has been doing many cruel and absurd things, too many to list, and besides which most readers of this blog are already aware of them. It has provided late night comics with plenty of fodder. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show provides many examples over a few days from just the past week.

But this is no laughing matter. It is tempting for people who are sane and rational to try and find reasons for Trump’s bizarre and erratic behavior. One of the most popular ones is that he is a master of distraction and uses these things to take people’s attention away from his declining popularity, the high cost of living and housing, lack of health care plans, and of course, the Epstein files.

But his actions over Greenland, his weird text message to the prime minister of Norway complaining about not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize being a factor in his attempt to annex Greenland (even though it is a protectorate of Denmark and not Norway) and that he would impose tariffs on European countries if they did not agree to his demands, suggest to me a level of irrationality that cannot be easily explained away as some kind of deep fake.
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Trump’s Greenland obsession and the Mercator map projection

Trump seems obsessed with the idea of the US taking over Greenland, much to the alarm of European countries that support a continuation its current status as an semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. There is little support even from Greenlanders for becoming part of the US. He has even announced tariffs, the weapon that he uses for pretty much everything, to punish any countries that oppose this move, and has already applied it.

Trump said that “Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland have journeyed to Greenland, for purposes unknown,” a reference to the European countries who have said in recent days that they will send troops to Greenland as a show of solidarity with Denmark, after weeks in which Trump and top allies have renewed demands to take the territory. Most European countries have been vocal in their opposition to Trump’s efforts to take over Greenland.

Calling it a “potentially perilous situation,” Trump said he would impose 10 percent tariffs on imports of all goods starting Feb. 1 from those countries to the U.S., increasing to 25 percent on June 1. He said it would only be removed after a deal is reached for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

“This is a very dangerous situation for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Planet. These Countries, who are playing this very dangerous game, have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable,” Trump said, embracing what amounted to a military threat against some of Washington’s closest and oldest allies.

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Trump and Machado compete to see who is more pathetic

One of the more nauseating sights these last few days has been the way that this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and Trump have been acting. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado initially accepted the prize and this apparently really ticked off Trump who seems to have made it one of his major life goals to get the prize. He was so incensed that Machado got it that he supposedly rejected installing her as president of Venezuela after his attack on that country and the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, even though Machado fulsomely praised Trump for his assault on Venezuela’s sovereignty.

Machado, seeing her chance of becoming president slipping away because of Trump’s childish pique, tried to ingratiate herself with him even more by ‘presenting’ Trump with the prize at their meeting at the White House.
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The future of big physics

When it comes to research in experimental physics in areas that already exist, the frontiers that are usually explored are those of precision and size.

In the case of the precision frontier, the idea is to measure something more precisely than it has been done before because with greater precision there is a better chance of finding disagreement with theoretical expectations. Such disagreements (or ‘anomalies’), especially if they persist and are recognized as not being due to some errors in experiment or theoretical calculations, are the basis for thinking that there might be something new going on and may lay the foundations for some kind of breakthrough.

The other frontier is to extend the range of the parameters and in the case of high-energy physics, that means going to higher and higher energies. But this is enormously expensive. The Large Hadron Collider that was built at CERN at a cost of billions of dollars reached the existing energy limit and it resulted in the detection of the long-sought Higgs boson.
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“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Fed chair?”

In the classic 1964 film Becket, in 1170 AD King Henry II of England (played by Peter O’Toole), angered by the opposition of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket (played by Richard Burton), expresses his frustration by saying “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Four knights who heard this interpreted it as a command and, no doubt seeking to curry favor with their boss by showing how loyal they were, they then murdered Becket. This event is a historical fact, though those are likely not the exact words used by Henry II, especially since he spoke only Latin and French and his words had to be later translated into English. Ever since then, that sentence has been invoked whenever someone in power has a rival removed without explicitly ordering it.

The phrase is commonly used in modern-day contexts to express that a ruler’s wish may be interpreted as a command by their subordinates. It is also commonly understood as shorthand for any rhetorical device allowing leaders to covertly order or exhort violence among their followers, while still being able to claim plausible deniability for political, legal, or other reasons.

This episode immediately came to my mind when I heard that Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, had been subpoenaed as part of a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve by the department of justice. Trump has repeatedly railed against Powell because he did not reduce interest rates as frequently and as rapidly as he wanted him to and it appears that a quartet of Trump sycophants interpreted this the way Henry II’s knights did, that they needed to remove Powell.
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