The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
[Note: Given the controversial nature of this topic and the subtlety of the arguments involved that might require multiple exchanges and clarifications, I am lifting the three comment limit for this post, though the rule against acting like a jerk remains and indeed will always remain.]
On January 10, 2026, I gave a talk at the local Skepticamp Conference on The Death of Free Will. I am attaching the link to the video below. It is about 25 minutes long, followed by another 20 minutes of Q/A.
Since you cannot see the slides that well, I am attaching a pdf of the slides so that you can follow along.
Enjoy!
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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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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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.
…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 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.
…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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[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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One of the huge benefits of the internet and social network platforms is their ability to connect people with other people who may share similar interests and needs. This can be especially important for those who suffer from various debilitating symptoms for which there seems to be no clearly identifiable cause and for which their doctors have resorted to just trying to alleviate the symptoms, usually with just partial success. Finding others with similar conditions can be a relief, since sometimes those around them may speak and act like they harbor suspicions that the sufferer does not have any real problems but may be a hypochondriac or merely trying to get attention and sympathy
Siddhant Ritwick and Tomi Koljonen describe some of them.
While diseases such as cancer, AIDS, ALS, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and diabetes often evoke deep fear, sympathy and collective urgency – reflected in dedicated charities, advocacy groups and public awareness campaigns – there exists an under-recognised class of bodily conditions that also wreaks havoc on human lives. These illnesses often receive little social legitimacy and may even be dismissed by medical professionals, family members and society at large as mere tiredness, laziness or psychological fragility. Conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Long COVID and Lyme disease are often dismissed as trivial, yet they can be profoundly disabling. Though not usually life-threatening, these overlooked illnesses can dismantle a person’s social, professional and emotional world, leaving sufferers severely disadvantaged – often without the sympathy or structural support afforded to more widely recognised diseases.
Reflux diseases are among the many conditions that can trap sufferers in a spiral of chronic suffering.
…These brutal conditions are neither mysterious like Long COVID, whose causes and progression remain uncertain, nor urgent like cancer. Instead, they occupy an uncomfortable middle ground: familiar, longstanding and supposedly manageable.
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.
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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