A plague on both their houses

The fight between Trump and Musk is lasting longer than I expected. This article describes the leverage that each has and the harm that each can do to the other.

The. problem for Musk is that Trump has all the levers of government (especially the justice department) and a pliant Republican party at his disposal. Forced to choose between getting Trump’s endorsement and MAGA support for their election efforts and Musk’s money, they will opt for Trump. The fact that Musk spent $25 million on the race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat only to have his chosen candidate lose by double digits will make them think that he is a paper tiger and that his threats to fund opposing candidates in the primaries and general election (or even start a new political party) may not amount to as much as alienating Trump.

Musk mainly has his money (although that is considerable), his social media platform Twitter/X, and the companies like SpaceX and Starlink that the government is dependent upon. While Musk can harm the government by withdrawing the Dragon space program from NASA and not providing Starlink services to various parts of the world (like Ukraine), he will also be hurting himself since they provide a huge source of revenue in the form of government contracts. Meanwhile Trump does not give a damn about who else Musk hurts, even if he targets major US government programs. He only cares about his own power and money and ego.
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What NOT to do if you are late for your flight

Suppose you arrive at the airport too late to board your flight and it has just left the gate. What should you do?

Normal people will kick themselves for being late and then either rebook for a later flight or just go home. But John Charles Robinson had an idea: Call in a bomb threat and have the flight delayed so that he could still board it.

According to a criminal complaint filed June 6 in U.S. District Court in Detroit, the bomb threat that led to a Spirit Airlines flight being evacuated and delayed by six hours at Metro Airport on Thursday, June 5, was a hoax. The person behind the hoax, the complaint says, is 23-year-old John Charles Robinson, of Monroe, who prosecutors say was headed to Los Angeles on Thursday morning when he missed his 7 a.m. Spirit Airlines flight and was told at the gate that he had to rebook.

Robinson, though, had another idea in mind: call in a bomb threat with the hopes of the flight being delayed long enough so that he could still make it on the plane, court records state.
…

The investigation found no bombs on the airplane, or in any luggage.

But what authorities would eventually discover was a hoax, with cellphone records leading the FBI to Robinson, who had rebooked a 6:28 p.m. flight to Los Angeles.

But he didn’t make that flight either.

Robinson did arrive at the terminal on time, only FBI agents showed up to interview him.

According to the complaint, Robinson initially denied making any phone calls to Spirit Airlines. Though after he gave consent to have his cellphone searched, the complaint states, the agents discovered the hoax.

Robinson then reportedly fessed up:

“(He) stated that he made the call with the hope that it would delay the flight long enough for him to make it in time so he would not have to take a different flight,” the complaint states.

It boggles the mind that anyone would think that calling in a fake bomb threat was a good solution to being too late for a flight. Apart from seriously inconveniencing all the other passengers and crew on his flight as well as the knock-on delays for other flights, who these days does not know that calling in a fake bomb threat will result in serious trouble with the law?

Note that Robinson is just 23 years old, so file this story under the category of “Young men tend to do really stupid things”.

Finally! Kilmar Ábrego García (and another) returned after illegal deportations

When El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele visited the White House, he and Trump seemed to be treating the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, who had been wrongly deported by Trump to that country and was being held in a controversial mega-prison, as a joke. Trump coyly said that there was nothing he could do since Ábrego García was now under the jurisdiction of Bukele, and Bukele in turn said that he would not be released, despite demands from a US federal judge that he be returned. Then suddenly today, Ábrego García was brought back.

But that is not the end of his ordeal. The attorney general Pam Bondi has said that he faces criminal charges here.

In a press briefing on Friday, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that a federal grand jury in Tennessee had indicted the 29-year-old father on counts of illegally smuggling undocumented people as well as of conspiracy to commit that crime.
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In a statement to the Hill on Friday, Ábrego García’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg accused the Trump administration of having “disappeared” his client “to a foreign prison in violation of a court order”.

“Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him,” he added.

Sandoval-Moshenberg also said: “This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished – not after.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg said the White House’s treatment of his client was “an abuse of power, not justice”. He called on Ábrego García to face the same immigration judge who had previously granted him a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador “to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent” there.
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Ábrego García also had no criminal record in the US before the indictment announced on Friday, according to court documents.

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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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