Trump seems to be careening ever-more erratically day by day. He started out by seeming to have some kind of plan, such as imposing tariffs, getting rid of anything that addressed the needs of marginalized groups such as DEI programs, deporting huge numbers of people for the flimsiest reasons, firing as many government employees as he could, and cutting research funding for science. While these measures were disastrous for the general well-being of the country, they were within the framework of the agenda of the extreme rightwing nutjobs who had his ear.
But then as the pushback came, as it surely would, with judges especially thwarting his efforts because of their blatant illegality, Trump seemed to go utterly berserk, responding to each and every setback with new executive orders that border on the farcical. His multiple reversals on tariffs are but one example. His war with Harvard University is not the most serious of his rampages but is emblematic. He seems to be furious with that university because they have stood up to his actions so he responds with even more absurd executive orders, such as forbidding visas for any foreign students hoping to enroll there. To issue an executive order targeting a single university is a sign of a deranged mind.
Another sign of derangement is what happened with NASA. Trump had nominated billionaire entrepreneur (and friend of Elon Musk) Jared Isaacman to head the agency, presumably on Musk’s recommendation. The process was going smoothly and the Senate was on the verge of approving him. Then at the last minute Trump pulled the nomination. Why? Isaacman thinks that it was because Musk had harshly criticized Trump’s budget bill and that this was payback. Is this the case? Who knows for sure but given Trump’s pettiness and reflexive reaction to anyone he thinks is against him, it seems very plausible.
It is exhausting trying to keep up with the way that this administration is careening from day to day, with the excesses piling up.
A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me a question, triggered by the video below, about the motion of a double pendulum. This is a pendulum that has another pendulum hanging from its bottom end. If the pendulum is set in motion above a certain amplitude, the motion starts out being steady but after a while it becomes chaotic, as if it has gone haywire.
This gif illustrates the motion.
(Zvika, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
In this second gif, three coupled pendulums are set in motion at the same time from the same position. Initially they all move together but because of infinitesimally small differences in their starting locations, after a while the motions differ wildly, a characteristic of chaotic motion.
(Zvika, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
This is the Trump administration now. It is chaotic. Long gone is any sense that it was following some ideological agenda in any disciplined manner. It is true that the desire to have the government serve the oligarchy is still there. But the need for Trump to take revenge on anyone whom he thinks is thwarting him is so great that we are now in a state where nothing is predictable except more chaos.
One is tempted to just throw up one’s hands and say “Not my circus, not my monkeys” and spend one’s time on other things, waiting for the inevitable infighting and collapse as the insiders fight for the spoils that they think they are entitled to.
But the damage that will be done to so many people and institutions is too great to allow for such distancing and there are many people and groups that are organizing to resist.
Is there any truth in the rumour that Barron Trump wanted to study in Harvard, but was rejected? Which is the small reason that started the big war against Harvard.
The real demo is much more chaotic than the gifs. Those bursts of rapid loops are really startling. “You think it’s finished and settles down and then it manages to get some energy from somewhere and do another loop.” Hmm, Ketamine? Adderall? Cocaine?
Does this phenomenon increase or decrease with a triple, quadruple, etc, pendulum?
I’ve also seen trump 2 labelled as the “fire hose of chaos”. 🙂
Painful TV to watch
“Trump goes nuts in press conference with German chancellor”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=sgWqJJwcmhw
@ Lassi Hippeläine
Donald Trump is probably happy that Barron is not going to Harvard because he can’t stand to be upstaged by anyone, not even his children. It is apparently true that Fred Trump really wanted Donald to attend an Ivy League school, and probably would have been most pleased if Donald had gotten into Harvard, and his niece Mary Trump has said she was told by his now deceased sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, that she drove him all over New York trying to find an Ivy to accept him. Now, Harvard is not in New York, so it is unclear whether Donald applied to Harvard and was rejected, or maybe his family realized Harvard would never accept such a screw up, so he didn’t even apply.
In any case, it seems that the way he got into the Wharton School entitles Donald to claim he graduated from an Ivy but with an asterisk, so he may be mad at Harvard simply because it is considered the premier Ivy, and the whole system resisted him all those years ago.
I have no idea if the MN (malignant narcissist) has personal reasons to target Harvard but the attack upon higher education in general is from the Project 2025 blueprint for destruction, for example:
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/project-2025-and-higher-education
These right wingers cannot stand anyone who stands in the way of their efforts to indoctrinate rather than educate people. That the extremists accuse “liberals” of indoctrinating students is yet another example of projection.
Edmund Burke will soon be seen as a left winger.
an apt illustration
https://poets.org/poem/duel
Behold the beautiful catfight between Musk and Trump that is unfolding as we are reading this.
Pierce @#3,
I a not sure how you would measure the increase or decrease of chaos. Chaos is chaos. If the dynamics of a system are such that it is chaotic, it is hard to know how to quantify it.
There’s another kind of chaotic-pendulum arrangement, which consists of a bar turning around its midpoint, not one end, with a pendulum swinging from each end. Not sure what it’s called; but it can look amusingly chaotic too.
(PS: Just want to quibble that that video should have gone on until the double pendulum came to a complete stop.)
Raging Bee @#11,
YouTube Shorts is an attempt to capture the TikTok audience and has a limit of 3 minutes, so if the pendulum went on longer than that, they would have had to stop it anyway. Apparently users find that videos less than 30 seconds long are better at capturing attention.
This one was a little over one minute. What I found quite remarkable was that the pivots about which the two pendulums rotated must have extremely low friction for it to have gone even that long.
Mano Singham @ # 10: [I am] not sure how you would measure the increase or decrease of chaos.
Me neither, but the variance of speed and direction of each pendulum-section seems pretty easily measurable (even if “… then it manages to get some energy from somewhere and do another loop.”) and comparable with the behavior of pendula with different numbers of sections.
Unless, I s’poze, the Oxford professor has it right when he implies his gadget violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.
i’ve seen it suggested that that’s the point: “Flood the zone with shit” as has been attributed to Steve Bannon. But while that could make a twisted sort of sense for the constant stream of illegal actions, it doesn’t seem plausible either for the tariffs -- which seem to be Trump’s obsession, born of combined xenophobia and ignorance, nor of the feud with Musk (although that seems to have been instigated by Musk).