- Speculations about yesterday’s observations;
- Stupidity and mendacity: removing parts of the Constitution from government websites;
- American science withdraws; RFK Jr doesn’t believe in mRNA vaccines;
- Hegseth and academic mediocrity;
- America has defunded one of the smartest beings on the planet;
- And an example of Arvo Pärt’s striking early music, and Tintinnabuli.
Following up on the previous post:
Now, why would this be? I tend to fall back on some notion of how the human mind, a product of evolution in a world that now virtually no longer exists, was primed for survival, not understanding of the real world. Survival for thousands or even millions of years meant increasing levels of cooperation, in small tribes and larger and larger communities. Knowing whether someone was on your side — loyalty — meant more than anything, certainly more than fealty to the real world, because there was no understanding of the real world outside of mundane circumstances of survival.
And that worked fine, more or less, for all that time. As the species grew and spread itself across the planet tribes became differentiated, mostly through random evolutionary processes (except for skin color, which was adaptive), and both tribalism and competition for resources led to increased conflicts among tribes. Now, in the modern world, we’re all increasing dependent on each other, both because no one state or nation can maintain the infrastructure of the technological world all by itself, and because global, existential, problems exist that cannot be solved by any one state or nation. Climate change, the threat of nuclear war, global pandemics, even perhaps AI. Those who would withdraw from the world into their own nationalistic or religious shell are abandoning responsibility for humanity’s future, retreating into a dead-end past, and undermining their own survival in the long run.
But there’s a bit more.
There’s a range in human nature along various scales of perception and understanding and concern. Those who would withdraw from the world and ignore long-term threats are victims of short-term thinking (or, simply greed), as are those who would dismantle governmental agencies they simply don’t understand, because the world they live in is very simple. Some of them are mendacious — as several of the examples yesterday — and some of them are just not very bright — as in the examples recently about how gerrymandering works, and cutting prices by 1500%.
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Today’s example of mendacity, or merely stupidity, is this.
JMG: Federal US Constitution Site Deletes “Habeas Corpus”
From Rolling Stone, 6 Aug 2025: Govt. Website ‘Glitch’ Removes Trump’s Least Favorite Part of Constitution, subtitled “The online Constitution website is maintained by the Library of Congress, which Trump is trying to take over”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has publicly floated the idea of suspending habeas corpus to aid the president’s efforts to arrest and deport immigrants.
Within the past few weeks, Section 9 from Article 1 of the Constitution — which states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” — disappeared from the Library of Congress’ Constitution Annotated webpage.
Also:
Raw Story, 6 Aug 2025: Shock as parts of Constitution disappear from government site: ‘Almost didn’t believe it’
TechCrunch, 6 Aug 2025: Key sections of the US Constitution deleted from government’s website
Several sections of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution appear to have been removed from the official U.S. government website, as pointed out by sleuths on the internet and as seen by TechCrunch.
The changes were made in the past month, according to the Wayback Machine, which shows the full original text on Congress’ website as of July 17.
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Now, this is clearly mendacious, because we’ve known that the Trump administration wants to ship whomever it perceives as immigrants out of the country as quickly as possible, without any of that bothersome due process. But it’s also monumentally stupid. What was the point? Editing a website doesn’t change the content of the actual Constitution. Did they think that their critics, looking up the language of the Constitution to challenge their behavior, wouldn’t be able to find the relevant passages and so be flummoxed? Certainly the lawyers and judges wouldn’t be.
(I note this story has not been seen on the major news sites, e.g. CNN, NYT, WaPo. Perhaps they realize it’s ultimately trivial and self-defeating.)
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Yet again, here is American science withdrawing from something superstitious critics don’t actually understand. Or perhaps it’s an action by a conscious saboteur to wreck American leadership in science.
NY Times, 5 Aug/6 Aug 2025: Kennedy Cancels Nearly $500 Million in mRNA Vaccine Contracts, subtitled “That kind of shot was first used during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the health secretary has been sharply critical of the technology.”
mRNA is messenger RNA. Does Kennedy have any idea what he’s talking about? Who is he to overrule the experts with decades of experience? (Answer per above: he supports the MAGA storybook.)
The new cancellations dismayed scientists, many of whom regard mRNA shots as the best option for protecting Americans in a pandemic.
“This is a bad day for science,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been working to develop an mRNA vaccine against influenza.
First used during the Covid-19 pandemic by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response.
Unlike traditional vaccines, which can take years to develop and test, mRNA shots can be made within months and quickly altered as the virus changes. The technology won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.
And
Washington Post, Editorial Board, 6 Aug 2025: RFK Jr.’s slander of mRNA technology will harm Americans, subtitled “Canceling research will slow down lifesaving innovation and increase U.S. vulnerability to pandemics.”
Kennedy’s resistance against mRNA vaccines is without evidence. In fact, the technology — which instructs the body’s cells to produce a harmless bit of virus that is then used to train the immune system, as opposed to using weakened or dead versions of a virus — delivered arguably the most important achievement of President Donald Trump’s first term: the production of effective vaccines against the novel coronavirus within the span of a few months. Such speed was practically unheard-of in biomedical research.
All technology involves an element of risk assessment that conservatives seem not to understand.
As with any medical treatment, these vaccines were not perfect. In very rare instances among adolescents, they resulted in a serious side effect known as myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle. Their effectiveness also waned over time as the coronavirus mutated, as is the case with vaccines for other respiratory diseases. But there can be no doubt: These vaccines saved millions of lives.
The anti-seat belt activists back in the 1960s worried, for example, about someone driving into a lake, say, and being unable to escape their car because they were trapped by their seat belt. How often did that ever happen, compared to the many more times people were saved by their seat belts from plunging through their windshield in a crash?
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Thus, conservatives are anti-education, because they don’t want to hear — and certainly don’t want their children to hear — anything that might challenge their religious or nationalistic stories.
Note here the subtitle.
The Atlantic, Eliot A. Cohen, 6 Aug 2025: Hegseth’s Headlong Pursuit of Academic Mediocrity, subtitled “His military-education reforms seem designed to ensure fighting men can’t think and thinking men can’t fight.”
The Trump administration is right about many of the failures of elite universities, particularly when compared with character-oriented institutions such as the United States Army. Consider the case of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was admitted to and graduated from prestigious degree programs at top universities but resigned from the Army National Guard at the lowly rank of major. The Army, unlike Princeton and Harvard, knew a petulant, insecure mediocrity when it saw one.
For whatever reason—perhaps Hegseth had a rough time in freshman calculus or was embarrassed while parsing a difficult passage of Plato—he seems determined to bar academics or anyone who faintly resembles one from contact with the armed forces. He has prohibited officers from attending the Aspen Security Forum, presided over by well-known radicals such as my former boss Condoleezza Rice. He has extended this ban to participation in think-tank events where officers might meet and even get into arguments with retired generals and admirals, not to mention former ambassadors, undersecretaries of defense, retired spies, and, worst of all, people with Ph.D.s who know foreign languages or operations research.
Gift link, above, so you can read the rest.
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MAGA, of course, has no use for abstract knowledge, and mathematics is arguably the most abstract of all knowledge. I’ve heard of this guy, Terence Tao, several times, over the years. He’s now at UCLA.
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The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, 6 Aug 2025: He’s the ‘Mozart’ of Math and Trump Killed His Funding, subtitled “The latest casualty in the administration’s assault on higher education is a legendary researcher who embodies the best of America.”
TERENCE TAO MAY BE ONE OF THE SMARTEST human beings on the planet. That’s not an exaggeration.
Now a UCLA professor, Tao has been a mathematics superstar for pretty much his entire life, going all the way back to the early 1970s when he was a 2-year-old with building blocks showing the other kids how to count. He was 7 when he started calculus, 13 when he became the youngest person ever to win the International Mathematical Olympiad, and 19 when he started his Ph.D. at Princeton.
Tao’s work on prime numbers has provided crucial insights into random-number generation, which is the way computers produce the (nearly) unpredictable figures that are necessary for cryptography and cybersecurity. His research into the math of imaging has helped to make MRIs faster and smarter.
In 2006 Tao was awarded the Fields Medal—math’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, as anyone who has watched Good Will Hunting knows. In 2017, National Geographic included Tao in its “Genius” issue alongside Michelangelo, Darwin, and Einstein. And among his many admirers Tao is known as the “Mozart of Math”—a term of affection in a sometimes cutthroat world, where Tao has a reputation for mentoring young, still undiscovered scholars and sharing credit generously.
He is pretty much the platonic model of an intellectual, innovator, and teacher—the best of America, in so many ways. And now he’s a cautionary tale too, because he just lost his funding in the latest wave of Trump administration cuts. It has left him questioning the future of American STEM research, and his place within it.
“A year ago I was absolutely sure I would be staying at UCLA for the foreseeable future,” Tao told me. “But now that there are existential risks . . . I cannot make any long-term predictions.”
Since I don’t subscribe to The Bulwark, this is as much of the article as I can see.
I suppose I should issue the standard reminder that research, whether mathematical or to build rocket ships to the Moon, inevitably has real-world payoffs. Despite the business-oriented worldview of conservatives, investment in research seems to be something they repeatedly reject. I attribute it to their short-term thinking.
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Back to Arvo Pärt. I seem to have about 21 Arvo Pärt albums, beginning with the one called TABULA RASA, released in 1984 but not acquired by me until 1991. (What was the trigger? I don’t remember. I don’t think hearing his music in a movie. Perhaps because the local classical music station in LA, KUSC, began playing his music?)
The first couple albums, this one and PASSIO, have medium and shortish pieces that are not overtly religious. According to Wikipedia, he was experimenting with a minimalist style he called Tintinnabuli, based on Gregorian Chant.
Musically, Pärt’s tintinnabular music is characterized by two types of voice, the first of which (dubbed the “tintinnabular voice”) arpeggiates the tonic triad, and the second of which moves diatonically in mostly stepwise motion.[1] The works often have a slow and meditative tempo, and a minimalist approach to both notation and performance. Pärt’s compositional approach has expanded somewhat in the years since 1970, but the overall effect remains largely the same. An early example can be heard in Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.
I admit that I am not sufficiently musically literate (“tonic triad”?) to understand this. But the music is striking, and beautiful. Here is the Cantus mentioned in the quote. The version on the CD is only 5 minutes long; many of the YouTube videos are longer, even 8 or 9 minutes. This version is about 6 minutes. It’s quite stunning.
