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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Every sperm is sacred

A legislator in Mississippi has filed a bill in the state legislature titled “Contraception Begins at Erection Act”.

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

In a statement to WLBT News, Blackmon wrote, “All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are fifty percent of the equation.

This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.”

I am not sure if he is being genuine or this is a parody meant to highlight the extreme measures that anti-abortion extremists will go to to control the bodies of women.

Either way, it reminded me of this scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (1983).

When all you’ve got is a hammer …

… every thing looks like a nail.

Trump promised that he would end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office. That, of course, did not happen. But on day two he revealed his grand plan for ending the war. It turns out that the plan is the same as what he has proposed for pretty much all the problems, and that is to threaten to impose “Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries”.

Trump seems to think that tariffs and other measures on imports is the magic formula to solve every single problem with other countries, and even to solve the budget deficits, irrespective of any realistic analysis of whether that will work. In this case, a little thought would reveal the weakness of his position. The US imports $15.7 billion worth of goods and services from Russia. Russia’s GDP is about $2.2 trillion, so exports to the US account for just 0.7% of Russia’s GDP. This is hardly of the size that would have Russia quaking in its boots and force it to change its policy. Putin has to know that Trump’s tariff threat is a paper tiger.

I wonder what Trump will do when he realizes that tariffs cannot do everything he wants. In fact, it is a very blunt and limited weapon.

Putin has grand ambitions for Russia, such as taking it back to what he sees as its glorious past when it was part of the Soviet Union and even earlier to Tsarist Russia. While he may do something symbolic in Ukraine in order to allow Trump to save face, I cannot see him abruptly ending the war because that would cause him (and in his mind Russia) to look weak and subservient to the US.

The real test for Trump will come when Ukraine asks for more money and weapons to continue the war.

The US is a dying democracy

One way that democracies end is suddenly, by means of a coup or other other extra-legal or quasi-legal means that replace an elected government by an unelected one.

But democracies can also die slowly. While the functions of governments are supposed to be based on the laws and constitutions that prescribe how they should operate, those cannot cover every possible eventuality. The filling of those gaps is heavily dependent on institutions and norms that have been built up over time. These institutions are the legal system, a free press, trade unions, and public interest groups that protect the rights of minorities and individuals against the unchecked use and abuse of governmental power. Democracies die more slowly when those institutions and norms that form the foundation upon which democracies are based are eroded and become merely shells and thus effectively eliminated. [Read more…]

How much license does a writer of nonfiction have?

The 1936 Berlin Olympics is recalled as the effort by Adolf Hitler to showcase Germany as a prosperous modern state that showed the superiority of the Aryan race. This effort was dented by Jesse Owens, the Black American athlete who won four gold medals in the 100m, 200m, long jump, and 4x100m relay. But there was another event, rowing, in which the American team edged out the Italian team to second and the German team to third place. The nine-member American team was all white so this result had no racial implications but it still stung for the Germans who had hoped to get the gold. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Goering all were present for this event and were seemingly excited when it seemed like the German team would win, only to be deflated at the last minute.

The book The Boys on the Boat by Daniel James Brown tells this story. Rowing had long been dominated n the US by the east coast Ivy League schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and by Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, but this American team was made up of mostly people with working class backgrounds at the University of Washington.
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Distinguishing between long-term and short-term trends

When it comes to gauging the public mood on issues of importance, we tend to be overly swayed by the results of high-profile elections. For example, when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and re-elected in 2012, it seemed to suggest that the country was beginning the process of overcoming its deep history of racism. But other than those conservatives who argued that this showed that systemic racism was over, few were naive enough to think that it marked the end of racial discrimination, and that much still needed to be done. But the feeling was that there was a positive trajectory. Trump’s election in 2012 shifted the mood back towards darkness, suggesting that overt racism was indeed alive and well. Joe Biden’s election seemed to suggest a swing back towards more positive attitudes on a whole range of social issues. But the last election has made many people feel depressed, that we have actually regressed quite a bit, and maybe entering a period that has attitudes more reminiscent of the 1950s when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

I think that this deep pessimism is mistaken. There are surface and deep changes that take place in any society at the same time and one must distinguish between them. The former are like the ripples on waves on the ocean that can change fairly quickly while the latter are the deep ocean currents that change slowly. The former are short term swings in attitudes while the latter are deep-seated. We have to remember that relatively small changes in voting patterns, of the order of a few percent, can produce huge swings in election results, and some of that swing may be due to ephemeral factors.
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Book review: Kitchen Confidential (2000) by Anthony Bourdain

This book by one of the best-known celebrity chefs, that has the subtitle Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, describes the world of haute cuisine, of fancy restaurants serving French food or offering other forms of high-end dining, and what goes on behind he scenes in the kitchens. The food that he talks about is completely foreign to me, not even recognizing the names of the dishes or the chefs and restaurants he talks about. For me, food is something I feel that I have to eat in order to stay alive. I am not a good cook and tend to prepare and eat the same damn dull things over and over. So when I say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book and can strongly recommend it, it has to be because it is much more than about food.

So what made me decide to read the book in the first place? I first encountered Bourdain when I learned that one of his episodes on his long-running CNN documentary series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown dealt with Sri Lanka. I watched that and then watched a few other episodes. These shows were much more than about food, they were about the countries and the cultures he visited. What struck me about Bourdain was how comfortable he seemed in the many diverse cultures he encountered. He seemed to fit right in. He would eat whatever food they ate, without reservations. In his book, he says that he never shied away from any food at all as long as he was pretty sure it would not kill him. And the test of that was whether the locals ate it. He would eat and live in the way the locals did. If they sat on the floor, he sat on the floor. If they ate with their fingers, he ate with their fingers. If they ate with chopsticks, he ate with chopsticks. If they used banana leaves as plates, so did he. If they killed their food in the wild before eating it, and even ate it raw, so would he. He seemed to be completely at home, wherever he was.
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Biden will leave office with the blood of Gazans on his hands

There is finally talk of a possible ceasefire to end the carnage in Gaza, although the Israeli government is still delaying full acceptance, no doubt because the bloodlust of its extremists has not yet been satiated. While any cessation in the wanton killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military is to be welcomed, Jonah Valdez writes that the details of the deal show that it is almost the same as the one that fell apart over the past summer.

“This is the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring,” Biden said, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “The road to this deal has not been easy — I’ve reached this point because of the pressure that Israel put on Hamas, backed by the United States.”

It was a clear attempt by Biden to claim credit for the historic agreement forged in Doha, Qatar — a final part of his legacy on his way out of the White House. And it was a bid to take some of the spotlight from President-elect Donald Trump, who declared the deal “could have only happened” because of his involvement. 

But experts and Palestinian Americans who have been advocating for a ceasefire for months saw Biden’s speech as an admission that a deal should and could have happened far sooner, a delay resulting in the deaths of thousands more Palestinians, as well as Israeli hostages. And now, as the deal is set to go into effect on Sunday, many worry about how many more lives could still be lost between now and then. 

“It’s welcome, of course, and very, very, very long overdue — this could’ve been reached six, seven months ago,” said Khaled Elgindy, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past. 

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Kurt Gödel’s belief in the afterlife

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was a powerful logician whose contributions to logic, mathematics, and philosophy were immense. He was deeply interested in those aspects of philosophy that touched on religion and one of those was his ontological proof for God’s existence.

The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm’s ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: “God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist.” A more elaborate version was given by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716); this is the version that Gödel studied and attempted to clarify with his ontological argument.
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Gödel is not known to have told anyone about his work on the proof until 1970, when he thought he was dying. In February, he allowed Dana Scott to copy out a version of the proof, which circulated privately. In August 1970, Gödel told Oskar Morgenstern that he was “satisfied” with the proof, but Morgenstern recorded in his diary entry for 29 August 1970, that Gödel would not publish because he was afraid that others might think “that he actually believes in God, whereas he is only engaged in a logical investigation (that is, in showing that such a proof with classical assumptions (completeness, etc.) correspondingly axiomatized, is possible).”[2] Gödel died January 14, 1978. Another version, slightly different from Scott’s, was found in his papers. It was finally published, together with Scott’s version, in 1987.

(For more see Oppy, Graham. 2017. “Ontological Arguments.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2017 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta.)
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