Trump will be mad that Nobel committee says, “No peace prize for you!”

This year’s Nobel peace prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado and Trump will be mad that he did not get it.

The peace prize was tarnished when it was awarded to the war criminal Henry Kissinger and it did not redeem itself when it gave the prize to Barack Obama who had done nothing to deserve it. But Trump clearly feels that he too deserves it and has been campaigning hard for it.

While Trump has played down his chances to win the prize, he has been active behind the scenes, phoning Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister, in Oslo this summer to tell him he wanted to discuss the “Nobel peace prize … and tariffs”. He regularly brings up the award; usually as he makes the tenuous claim to have ended six or seven wars since his return to the White House.

“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Trump said last year during the presidential race.

The obsession has become a running joke among foreign diplomats seeking to lobby their interests, including at a regular breakfast among European ambassadors where a common topic is how to keep Trump engaged in the support of Ukraine.

“Anytime he is talking about solving seven wars, he is really sending a message: give me the Nobel,” said one senior European diplomat based in Washington.
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Trump’s new push for a peace deal to end the [Gaza] war kicked into gear during last month’s UN general assembly, where he met with Arab leaders and then approved a 20-point peace plan that he announced during a White House summit with Benjamin Netanyahu in late September.

The timeline for the award has played an active role in trying to reach a deal this week, as officials have regularly said they believed a peace deal would be ready by Friday – the same day as the Nobel committee announces its choice.

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“Are observers fundamental to physics, or simply byproducts of it?”

I like this discussion because it does not try to hide the fact that the interplay of the observer and the wave function in quantum mechanics is a fundamental unresolved question in physics.

Are observers central to physics, or are they more accurately framed as bystanders to and byproducts of phenomena that exist independently of consciousness? In this interview from the long-running series Closer to Truth, Bernard Carr, an emeritus professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, traverses the double-slit experiment, the fine-tuning argument and more to explore what significance, if any, first-person observation holds in the realm of fundamental physics. In his conversation with the US presenter Robert Lawrence Kuhn, he doesn’t adopt a personal stance. Instead, he considers these persistent questions through a contemporary frame, assessing how discussions around them have evolved and where they stand among physicists today.

US policies are shifting global alliances

That India has for some time been a rising economic power, there can be no doubt. It has now surpassed China as the world’s most populous country and having a large domestic market undoubtedly helps in the creation of large businesses and industry. For the longest time, relations between US and India were cool, mainly because India, starting with its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, pursued a non-aligned foreign policy that chose to not align itself with either of the then two main power blocs of the US and the USSR. As a result, The US tended to see India’s traditional rival Pakistan as more of an ally and favored it.

That changed quite dramatically with the rise to power of Narendra Modi as prime minister, a right wing Hindu chauvinist who assiduously cultivated good relations with the US, especially with Trump. And for a while, the two seemed to be best friends. But recently, there has been a dramatic cooling of relations, with Trump putting some of the harshest tariffs on imports from India.

Isaac Chotiner tries to understand the dramatic shift by talking with Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As Vaishnav says, the 50% tariff on India is a major blow to India..
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More instances where I am on Rat’s side

(Pearls Before Swine)

It annoys me when I see people write on or dog-ear the pages of library books. Even with my own books, I never write on them or bend pages. I use bookmarks and if I want to note pages for future reference, I use small sticky tabs that peel off easily..

Here is another peeve where I agree with Rat.

(Pearls Before Swine)

Even if I am not straddling the line on either side, if I am too close to one line, I back out and re-park so that I am almost in the middle of the two lines. Not only is it a courtesy to those parking next to me, it also reduces the risk of the other driver accidentally hitting my car.

Meet Tilly Norwood, who may be the next big star

She is introduced in this clip.

As you would have read in the first frame, she and everyone else in that clip are entirely the creation of AI.

Meet Tilly Norwood, an up-and-coming on-screen talent who might just be the next big thing.

Norwood, as can be seen in the exclusive clip above, appears to be a talking, waving, bona fide person – she can even cry.

Except she’s not a real-life person: she doesn’t exist off a screen (yet), having instead been birthed via the increasingly sophisticated capabilities of AI software.

But then again, so has the entire sketch above, including all the other actors you see.

Norwood and the sketch are both the work of Particle 6, the UK production company created and led by Eline van de Velden, a former actor-turned-producer who also happens to have a Master’s degree in physics from London’s Imperial College.

“We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman, that’s the aim of what we’re doing,” van der Velden tells Broadcast International.
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The sketch is also acting as the first on-screen appearance for Norwood, and discussions are now in the works to see if talent agencies want to sign up the AI creation.

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September jobs data not released

Today is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly report giving the number os jobs gained or lost in the previous month plus any revisions to the numbers for the two preceding months. The last two jobs reports were awful, with job growth essentially stalled since May, indicating that the growth in economy has slowed dramatically, possibly indicating a recession. Trump fired the commissioner of the BLS in early August following the dismal job numbers for July (claiming that she had dishonestly manipulated the numbers to make him look bad) but things got even worse when the August numbers were released.

However the BLS did not release any numbers today and the official reason is that it is due to the shutdown. But that seems likely (what a surprise!) to be a lie.

The data for the release have already been collected, according to two former heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But the Trump administration has so far defied calls to publish the report.
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Earlier this week William Beach, who led the BLS for four years under Trump and Joe Biden, also said the jobs data for September “have been completely collected and processed” by the BLS. “The jobs report is likely written in final draft,” he wrote.

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Chicago fights back against ICE thuggery

The Guardian sent a reporter and camera crew to cover what is happening in Chicago as ICE sends its thugs there to harass the people of the city and how the people are responding.

The video also highlights Kat Abughazaleh, a 25-year old woman who is running to get the Democratic nomination to represent the 9th congressional district and was flung to the ground by an ICE thug during a protest. The district is currently represented by a Democratic congresswoman who is not running for re-election.

Abughazaleh’s platform aligns with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She favors expanding government support for childcare, universal preschool, Medicare for All (including healthcare for undocumented immigrants).

She is a supporter of LGBTQ and transgender rights, as well as the Green New Deal. Abughazaleh favors increased regulations on artificial intelligence.
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News organizations in Illinois nationally and internationally covered Abughazaleh’s announcement and subsequent campaign. Politico cited Bernie Sanders who encouraged progressives to run as independent candidates in the light of declining popularity of the party, and The Washington Post noted the possibility of her campaign being part of an anti-incumbent movement akin to the Tea Party. News coverage of Abughazaleh’s use of digital media, including Bluesky (rather than Musk’s X), predicted her skills would help her appeal to younger voters. Coverage also compared her to other younger candidates (including several new media “stars”) with progressive political stances who are seeking major US political offices, such as Zohran Mamdani, Isaiah Martin,Jake Rakov, George Hornedo, Saikat Chakrabarti, Elijah Manley, Mallory McMorrow, and Deja Foxx, and placed her in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s camp of “younger, energetic, left-leaning Democrats” who are “blunt about Democratic errors and missteps.

We definitely need to light a fire under the weak Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who have shown themselves incapable of rising to meet the challenge posed by Trump and MAGA authoritarianism.

The damage done to autism research

I wrote before how the actions of the Trump administration are eerily reminiscent of the Lysenko era in the former Soviet Union when Trofim Lysenko used the power of the government to suppress genetics research that did not agree with his prejudices, setting back agriculture in the country for decades. It is clear that the ghost of Lysenko now haunts the White House and the office of RFK Jr, as they have both decided that they only want to see research that supports what they already believe

The extraordinary press conference where Trump and RFK Jr. inveighed against the over-the-counter pain-killer Tylenol (the brand name for the drug acetaminophen) took people by surprise, even though we should be used be used by now to this duo pushing crackpot theories that have little or no factual basis.

For years, scientists have studied a possible link between pregnant mothers’ use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and neurological conditions like autism and A.D.H.D. The findings are complex. Some studies suggest a link; others do not. None have found proof of a causal relationship.

Yet Trump spoke as if the connection were definitive. He instructed pregnant women to avoid the drug. “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it,” he said.

It s easy for him to say. But what are pregnant women supposed to do when they need an analgesic?
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WNBA in MAGA’s crosshairs

Professional sports in the US is dominated by male teams whose players get the big contracts and media focus and thus are able to build up a big fan base. Soccer is one instance where the women’s teams have been much more successful than the men in international competitions and thus get a lot of attention though this has still not translated into financial parity.

Now it appears that women’s basketball, after a rocky start, is gaining in popularity and not just with female fans.

This season, the W.N.B.A.’s fan base was 57 percent male and 43 percent female, according to statistics provided by the league. Men have actually made up more than half of viewership for years, but they were mostly middle-aged before. Now they’re skewing younger. The number of boys under 18 who watch W.N.B.A. games has grown by 130 percent over the past four years.
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“The quality of the players has definitely gotten better,” said Joe Lacob, the billionaire who owns both the Valkyries and the Warriors. He said 55 percent of ticket holders at the women’s games in San Francisco were male.

The women are gritty and fierce, playing fast and sinking more 3-pointers than ever before.

Lacob sits courtside for most Valkyries games, and his guy friends are constantly asking him for tickets, he said. At one recent game, I spotted several heavily tattooed football players for the 49ers sitting beside him.

“People are not dumb,” Lacob said. “They see that it’s better. It just clicked.”

The Valkyries managed to become the first W.N.B.A. team to sell out all their home games, helping to propel the league to record attendance numbers. When you’re in their arena, the Chase Center, it feels like one big party.

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