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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The false claims by DOGE and Musk

By now, we should all be making the default assumption that any claims made by Trump and anyone in his administration are lies unless backed up by evidence showing that it could be true.

Ali Velshi breaks down the false claims made by Elon Musk and his DOGE that they saved the country a huge amount of money. Not only did they not do that, they caused a vast amount of damage.

What the internet and now AI reveal about us

What the internet and the latest forms of AI have revealed is that many people harbor the ugliest of impulses. People are likely to have had ugly impulses all along but only those in their physical proximity knew about them, if at all. But with the internet and social media, these people are able to not only anonymously reach a much wider audience but now with AI, they are able to find ways to exhibit those impulses in new and increasingly disgusting ways, as this article reveals. They are taking picture of real women (and even children) and doctoring them in sexually explicit ways, a process known as ‘nudification’. The targets of these new ways of attack are usually women, of course.

Such doctoring of images have been occurring since the invention of photography but it used to require sophisticated skills But now pretty much anyone can use the freely available AI (such as Elon Musk’s Grok) to generate doctored images of people and then share them widely through social media channels (like Musk’s X), while those companies seem to make little or no effort to find ways to prevent such abuse. And the situation is getting rapidly worse, on a time scale of days.
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Blog comment policy

I said that at the beginning of every month, I would repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month. I stopped doing so after awhile because I thought that at least long time readers would have absorbed the message. But it seems like the reminders are necessary, since there have been violations, some seemingly accidental and some so egregious that I have had to take action. But here is the general policy again.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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Another day, another murder by ICE

The thuggish and murderous rampage by ICE that is terrorizing the country continues, and now we have the murder of a woman on the streets of Minneapolis. There is video of the event that shows her trying to drive away and being shot multiple times by ICE agents. Trump is of course lying about what happened, claiming that she ran over the ICE agent when the video clearly shows nothing of the sort. There is only one word to describe it: murder.

Here is a video of the murder and the aftermath showing ICE preventing a physician from checking on the victim.

The mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey was unequivocal in his condemnation of the murder, not mincing his words.


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Christmas messages

I know that the Christmas season is over but I found some amusing stuff that I wanted to share just to break up the bad news that has been happening recently.

It is the custom in the UK for the monarch to give a Christmas message to the nation and the satirical puppet show known as Spitting Image provides a parody. (Thanks to commenter brigerjohannson.)

Another tradition that began in 1993 is for the UK’s Channel 4 to give an alternative message to the monarch’s speech and this year US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was surprised to be asked.

Here is Kimmel’s message.

Noam Chomsky and Epstein

I have long been an admirer, from my college days in Sri Lanka when I first came across his work, of Noam Chomsky, for his tireless support of oppressed people around the world, his deep analyses of the media, and his relentless critiques of the role of the US in creating and perpetuating injustices. He is not just one of the premier public intellectuals, he has been an inspiration of those seeking radical change around the globe.

Hence it came as a shock when the latest release of photographs from the Epstein files showed him flying with him in the latter’s private jet. Noam Chomsky? That Epstein would seek to ingratiate himself with Chomsky was no surprise, since Epstein, when not being an active pedophile, loved to surround himself with renowned intellectuals and used his wealth to buy that access, possible to compensate for the fact that he himself was not one. But what was Chomsky doing with a low-lifelike him? Many former admirers of Chomsky have been quick to to condemn him and Chomsky himself has not responded.

Michale Albert is someone who has known Chomsky well over five decades. Albert and Lydia Sargent founded the progressive magazine Z in 1987 as part of ZCommunications, later changed to ZNetwork. Albert has long been a friend of Chomsky and is possibly the best person to try and explain what happened and he has done so in a long essay that is well worth reading.

The first thing I learned is the reason for Chomsky’s silence. He suffered a devastating stroke in 2023 when he was 95 years old and has been unable to communicate since then. As Albert writes, following the release of the photo of Chomsky with Epstein:
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