The circus monkeys are running wild

When I posted yesterday about the Trump administration having rapidly moved into chaos territory, I wondered whether I might be overstating the matter. I need not have worried. Today saw a sudden explosion of social media posts between Trump and Musk where they go at each other like two bratty children who once jointly bullied everyone else but now suddenly find themselves at each other’s throats.

I was initially skeptical that this feud was genuine. I had a suspicion that Musk was worried because his Tesla company was in free fall because of anger over his cavalier wrecking of many agencies of government. This was supposedly to cut costs and eliminate the nearly two trillion dollar deficit but now has analysts saying that at best it might cut just $150 billion in the short term and even that might disappear when the final accounting is done, while the long term costs will be considerable. Since many of the people who buy electric vehicles are doing so over concern of the environment and are thus more likely to identify with liberal politics and the Democratic party, I thought that Musk might be trying to ingratiate himself with those same people. That might still be true but the level of venom that Trump and Musk have publicly spewed forth in such a short time suggests that this is not some manufactured conflict where they are still buddies behind the scenes. It is hard to realize that just a short while ago, Trump was acting like a shill for Tesla cars, promoting them at an event at the White House.
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The double pendulum as a metaphor for the Trump administration

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.
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“Not my circus, not my monkeys”

At my local bridge club, one member has his own coffee mug that has printed on the side “Not my circus, Not my monkeys”. I had never heard this before so I asked him what it meant and he said that it meant that whatever was the issue under discussion, it did not concern him and he wanted to have no part in it. I thought that it was one of those local idioms that people have. In Sri Lanka was have all manner of local idioms in the English language. “Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs” and “Why don’t you grow brinjals in your back garden?” are two particularly weird ones. The former means that you are trying to teach someone something that they already know very well while the second is essentially telling someone that they are wasting your time and should go and do something else. How these came about would be fascinating (Why would grandmothers know how to suck eggs? Why would they suck eggs anyway?) but their origins are lost in the mists of time

But then two days ago I was watching the British police procedural “Dept Q” that takes place in Scotland and in one scene, the police detective starts to explain something to his superior and she cuts him off, saying “Not my circus, Not my monkeys”. I burst out laughing at hearing this and realized that it must be more than a local saying so looked it up.

It originates apparently in Polish as the literal translation of the expression “Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy”. How such a phrase could have originated is not hard to guess. A circus is a chaotic situation and monkeys are hard to control and one can well imagine that it represents wanting to wash one’s hands of a messy situation.

I don’t know that I would even use such a saying myself. It sounds a little callous and unfeeling towards whoever is trying to explain something complicated to you.

But it is amusing.

Trump reveals his weakness with China

Trump has been boasting that the large tariffs he slapped on many countries (and then reduced, and then reintroduced, and then suspended, and then … well, you get the idea) had the effect of the heads of those countries begging to talk to him and make deals that would be favorable to the US. Maybe, maybe not. So far there have been few concrete deals announced.

But one place where that has definitely not happened is with the most important trading country of all, and that is China. They have clearly called his bluff and now it is Trump who seems to be pleading with the Chinese premier Xi Jinping to take his call but Xi is playing it cool.
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Learning to appreciate difficult novels

There are some novels that are notoriously difficult to read and require quite a bit of time and effort to penetrate, and may need the assistance of commentaries by scholars. James Joyce and William Faulkner are authors whose books tend to fall into this category. These books tend to be highly regarded by. scholars and are the ones often chosen for literature courses. I have attempted in the past to read some of those books and usually gave up without completing them.

In past posts, I have been somewhat harsh in my criticisms of this kind of writing (see here and here) and these cartoons captured some of my sentiments.

(Pearls Before Swine)

Here is another cartoon from back in 2021.

(Pearls Before Swine)
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Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

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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The search for a non-opioid painkiller

When I was an undergraduate, while walking across a grassy field, I stepped into a hidden hole and fell forward. As I did so, I flung out my left arm to break the fall and that jerky motion was sufficient to dislocate my shoulder. I recall being in excruciating pain and was taken to the campus health center where the person who treated me was very familiar with sports injuries such as dislocation and he simply straightened my elbow, gave my arm a twist, and pushed it back into the socket. Like magic, the pain ceased immediately and its sudden disappearance made me feel euphoric. But now, although I recall the incident vividly, I cannot remember what the pain actually felt like. I remember that I was in great pain, but I cannot recall the feeling of pain.

This is not uncommon. Sufferers of pain find it hard to communicate to others what they are actually experiencing, however acute it might feel to them. This unfortunately means that pain sufferers might get less sympathy and consideration from those around them. This feature also makes treatment of pain difficult because we have no pain-o-meters to measure it and see how effective any treatment might be. Despite that limitation, there have been tremendous strides in the categorization and treatment of pain in the last century, depending on the type of pain being experienced, such as inflammatory and chronic pain from things like rheumatoid arthritis that is caused by nerve damage, acute pain from things like broken bones, and pain from cancers.
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Musk’s costly trail of damage

Elon Musk and Donald Trump made grandiose promises on the campaign trail about by how much they would cut the federal budget. After starting with the preposterous figure of two trillion dollars, they later reduced it to a smaller but still preposterous figure of one trillion, a figure that Susan Glasser writes that no one who had spent a day in Washington gave any credence to. In fact, these DOGE cuts may end up costing the government more money.

Musk is leaving government (so he says) and people are looking at the wreckage he leaves behind.

The reviews of Musk’s rampage through Washington have been, deservedly, vicious: Who, during the past few crazy months, could have possibly failed to take note of his toxic combination of entitlement and ignorance, his vastly overstated claims, and his move-fast-and-break-things ethos that has resulted in wreckage that will take years to fully assess?
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In a round of exit interviews this week, Musk has sounded all the predictable notes of a naïve billionaire businessman mugged by Washington’s political reality.
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In an interview on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” he started the messy work of separating himself from the President. “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk admitted, given that Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor will add trillions of dollars to the budget deficit. Stating the obvious, which, these days, counts as an act of lèse-majesté among the Republican sycophants who surround Trump, Musk added that the measure “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
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It’s Thursday. Do you know what the tariffs are?

One has to feel some sympathy for the people at the US borders who are tasked with storing all the goods that arrive and not releasing them until the required duties are paid. With Trump careening from one tariffs policy to another on pretty much an ad hoc and day-to-day basis, they must be feeling as if they are in a whirlwind.

The latest reversal came last evening when the New York-based court of international trade (who knew that there was even such a court?) upheld a legal challenge that argued Trump had exceeded his legal authority when he bypassed Congress in announcing his tariffs.

The ruling by a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits argued Trump had exceeded his authority, leaving US trade policy dependent on the president’s whims and unleashing economic chaos around the world.

Tariffs typically need to be approved by Congress but Trump has so far bypassed that requirement by claiming that the country’s trade deficits amount to a national emergency. This had left the US president able to apply sweeping tariffs to most countries last month, in a shock move that sent markets reeling.

The court’s ruling stated that Trump’s tariff orders “exceed any authority granted to the president … to regulate importation by means of tariffs”.
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The court ruling immediately invalidates all of the tariff orders that were issued through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a law meant to address “unusual and extraordinary” threats during a national emergency.

The judges said Trump must issue new orders reflecting the permanent injunction within 10 days.

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UnitedHealth puts profit over health care

One thing that resulted from the killing by Luigi Mangione of the CEO of the health insurance conglomerate known as UnitedHealth is that it has resulted in that company’s practices getting closer scrutiny. And what is being revealed is ugly and bound to create even more anger against the company and its executives.

The whole private health insurance system in the US is systematically flawed and breeds corruption. Putting in private, profit-seeking entities such as hospitals and insurance companies between doctors and patients lead inevitably to fraud and waste and a siphoning off of resources that should go into health care into the pockets of insurance executives. UnitedHeath is by no means an outlier though it may be the most egregious offender because of its size and perhaps its greed.

The conditions for abuse within the Medicare and Medicaid system is clear. The government gives the insurance companies a lump sum, as opposed to per treatment. Whatever remains after the cost of treatment is profit for the insurance company. Hence there is a built in incentive to deny health care and UnitedHealth found many ways to do so.
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