The war on knowing by Marja Heikkinen

Science rarely dies with a dramatic bang. It dies in smaller rooms, beneath fluorescent lights, when a grant disappears, a laboratory closes, a young researcher decides to leave, or an inconvenient question becomes too politically expensive to ask.

That is what makes the Trump administration’s assault on American science so unsettling. It is not merely a quarrel over budgets, bureaucratic priorities or fashionable academic language. It is an attack on the habits of mind that make modern civilisation possible: curiosity, evidence, skepticism, correction and the stubborn willingness to say, “We do not know yet.”

The administration insists it is rescuing science from ideology. Politicians who regard inconvenient facts as partisan enemies have suddenly appointed themselves guardians of scientific purity. They speak of efficiency while injecting politics into research decisions, of excellence while weakening institutions that have spent generations building expertise, and of innovation while making researchers wonder whether tomorrow’s discovery will survive today’s political mood.

Science is the invisible plumbing of ordinary life. It sits behind vaccines, weather forecasts, cancer treatments, safer buildings, clean water, satellites and the technology used to manufacture propaganda at industrial speed.

Cutting scientific capacity is therefore not like cancelling an unnecessary conference. It is more like removing bricks from a bridge because the bridge has become ideologically offensive.

The most dangerous casualty may be curiosity itself. Researchers learn quickly when a government punishes certain subjects. They begin avoiding words. They redesign projects. They hesitate before pursuing questions involving climate, inequality, public health or politically inconvenient populations. Nobody needs to issue a formal order saying, “Do not investigate this.” Uncertainty does the censorship perfectly well.

That is how scientific decline becomes cultural decline. The United States did not become a scientific superpower because presidents knew more physics, biology or astronomy than everyone else. It became one because institutions allowed people to discover things that presidents did not expect, did not understand and sometimes did not particularly like.

That arrangement requires humility from power. The scientist says, “Here is what the evidence shows.” The politician may respond, “I dislike the implications.” Democracy can survive that disagreement. Science cannot survive a system in which the second sentence determines whether the first is funded.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with questioning scientific institutions. Science should be questioned constantly. That is its strength. But questioning a scientific conclusion is not the same thing as intimidating the people capable of producing conclusions.

Trumpism has confused the two. It treats expertise as a cultural badge, universities as political enemies and inconvenient evidence as something that can be bullied into submission. Yet viruses do not care about elections. Melting ice does not negotiate. Cancer does not check polling numbers. Gravity remains stubbornly nonpartisan.

The irony is grim: a movement obsessed with American greatness is weakening one of the principal engines that made America powerful.

Science does not belong to the left or the right. It belongs to whoever is brave enough to ask the next question.

If that habit is allowed to wither, the laboratories may still stand, the computers may still hum and the official speeches may still celebrate innovation. But the spirit that made discovery possible will be gone. And no executive order can bring back a curiosity that a country has taught itself to fear.

Zombies #Poem #Painting by Nikos Laios

 

The zombies swayed,
They sucked on blood,
They sucked on hatred
They sucked on misogyny,
They sucked on patriarchy,
They recited texts and
The zombies swayed
Left and right
Sucking on the
Delusion of religion,
Texts that preached
Death and hatred,
Submission and the
Death of freedom,
The zombies swayed
Crying out ‘brains’,
They fed on brains;
They were the living
Dead and only the
Consumption and
Death of the
Human mind
Would sustain
Them.

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With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

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Check Nikos Laios' eBOOK, HERE!

The $40 trillion bet by Zakir Hall

United States has finally reached the number that once belonged to science fiction, $40 trillion in gross national debt. The milestone arrived with remarkably little drama. There were no sirens, no shutters coming down on Wall Street, no solemn procession from the Treasury. Just another enormous number appearing on a government balance sheet while politicians carried on arguing about everything except the bill.

And yet something curious is happening. Alongside the familiar warnings of fiscal catastrophe, a more optimistic theory is gaining attention, perhaps US is approaching another great economic boom.

The theory is not entirely foolish. The United States is pouring extraordinary sums into artificial intelligence, data centres, semiconductors, electricity generation, defence, manufacturing and infrastructure. The argument is that today's borrowing could finance tomorrow's productivity revolution. If AI dramatically raises output, if factories return, if energy becomes cheaper and abundant, and if American technological dominance accelerates, today's frightening debt ratio could eventually look rather less frightening beside a vastly larger economy.

This is the seductive version of the story. Debt is not necessarily dangerous, its defenders say, if it finances growth faster than it creates liabilities. Borrow to build the future and the future, conveniently, pays the bill.

There is a problem. Governments have always been remarkably talented at borrowing against tomorrow while describing it as investment. Some of the borrowing genuinely is investment. Much of it is simply the political equivalent of putting dinner on a credit card.

America's current fiscal trajectory is hardly a picture of disciplined investment. The Congressional Budget Office expects a $1.9 trillion deficit in 2026, rising to $3.1 trillion by 2036. Meanwhile, interest costs are becoming an increasingly formidable part of the federal budget.

The distinction matters. Borrowing $1 trillion to build an electricity grid capable of powering an AI revolution is one thing. Borrowing $1 trillion because nobody wants to tell voters that benefits, tax breaks or military commitments cannot all expand simultaneously is another.

The boom theory also contains a deliciously American assumption: that productivity will arrive on schedule. Perhaps it will. AI could prove to be as transformative as electricity, the automobile or the internet. A manufacturing renaissance could increase wages and exports. New technologies could make enormous quantities of existing debt easier to carry. America has repeatedly escaped pessimistic forecasts because its capacity for innovation has been underestimated.

But innovation is not a Treasury bond. It does not come with a maturity date. The danger is that Washington begins treating the possibility of a boom as permission to borrow without limit. That would turn optimism into an accounting strategy. A country cannot permanently substitute predictions of future productivity for present fiscal discipline.

There is another uncomfortable possibility. The $40 trillion milestone may eventually be remembered neither as the beginning of an American collapse nor as the prelude to a glorious boom, but as the moment when the country discovered that both stories could be wrong.

America may grow rapidly and still become fiscally weaker. It may dominate AI and still struggle with interest payments. It may build magnificent factories while borrowing ever more simply to maintain existing promises. The real American wager, therefore, is not whether a boom is coming. It is whether Washington can resist spending tomorrow's boom before it arrives.

Worming #135 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A family of worms and all their worm friends worming in new adventures.

For more Worming, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The quiet Rubio doctrine by John Reid

Marco Rubio has discovered something useful in the Trump era, you do not have to shout if you can arrange the furniture. Donald Trump governs foreign policy like a man entering a casino through the kitchen door. The announcement comes first, the plan later, and the explanation is usually delivered in capital letters. J.D. Vance has developed his own version of political theater, turning every disagreement into a cultural sermon, every diplomatic encounter into a performance for the home audience.

Rubio is different. Or, more precisely, he is learning to look different. His Venezuela policy has placed him at the center of Washington’s most consequential experiment in Latin America, while his pressure campaign against Cuba suggests that Caracas was never merely an isolated target. The emerging pattern is broader: a United States increasingly willing to decide which governments in its neighborhood are acceptable, which economic relationships are tolerable, and which leaders should understand that Washington is watching.

That is Trumpism with a diplomatic tie. Rubio’s political talent lies in making muscular power sound like administration. He can speak the language of alliances while practicing the grammar of leverage. He can present coercion as strategy, pressure as patience, and intervention as hemispheric housekeeping. The result is less theatrical than Trump and therefore, in some respects, more politically interesting.

The danger for Latin America is that quietness can be mistaken for restraint. Cuba is the clearest example. Rubio appears to understand that Washington does not necessarily need another spectacular military adventure to alter Havana’s calculations. Economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, restrictions on oil and carefully calibrated threats can create a slow-motion crisis. It is a strategy with fewer television explosions and more spreadsheets.

That may make it easier to sustain and harder to notice. The same logic can travel. Venezuela has already demonstrated how quickly the vocabulary of counternarcotics, national security, migration and authoritarianism can merge into a justification for extraordinary American action. Other governments in the hemisphere may therefore find themselves wondering not whether they are allies, but whether they are sufficiently obedient ones.

For Rubio, however, there is another audience: the Republican Party. If he wants the presidency, he does not need to become another Trump. Indeed, that may be precisely the mistake he must avoid. Trump already occupies the market for spectacle. Vance occupies the market for ideological combat. Rubio can occupy the market for competence—the reassuring figure who claims to know where the levers are and pulls them without making a fuss.

That is a potentially formidable political brand. It also creates an uncomfortable paradox. The more successfully Rubio makes Trump’s foreign policy look orderly, the less visible the transformation becomes. A policy can be radical without sounding radical. An administration can expand American power while its secretary of state speaks in the calm tones of institutional continuity.

This is perhaps Rubio’s most important political innovation: not rejecting Trumpism, but laundering it through expertise. The quiet man in the room may ultimately prove more consequential than the loudest one.

And if Rubio reaches the Oval Office, history may discover that he was not merely waiting for Trumpism to end. He was taking notes. The question is whether voters will reward that method, or notice that beneath the polished delivery lies the same appetite for American dominance.

Remember the victims, not the scene by Maddalena Conti

There is something deeply uncomfortable about commemorating the victims of terrorism. The ceremonies are solemn, the speeches are carefully written, the candles are lit, the flags lowered and then, almost inevitably, the world moves on. The International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism, observed on 21 August, is supposed to interrupt that process. It was established by the United Nations precisely to honour victims and survivors, defend their rights and ensure that their suffering does not disappear once the cameras have gone.

But remembrance is not simply about remembering. It is about refusing to allow terrorism to have the final word. Terrorists want more than dead bodies. They want fear, headlines, political reactions and social division. They want ordinary citizens to look suspiciously at their neighbours, governments to panic, communities to fracture and politicians to discover convenient enemies. The bomb or the gun may be the instrument, but terror is ultimately a political theatre.

That is why victims should never become supporting actors in somebody else's narrative. Too often, after an attack, politicians arrive with microphones, commentators arrive with theories and social media arrives with outrage. The victims, meanwhile, are left with hospital bills, funerals, nightmares, empty chairs at dinner tables and lives permanently divided into "before" and "after". The immediate horror receives enormous attention; the years of consequences receive remarkably little.

That is the great hypocrisy of modern remembrance. We are very good at commemorating the dead. We are considerably less enthusiastic about supporting the living. Survivors can carry physical injuries, psychological trauma, financial hardship and social isolation for years. Families can be destroyed economically as well as emotionally. Yet public attention is notoriously short-lived. The news cycle moves to the next crisis, the politicians to the next election, and the public to the next outrage.

A memorial cannot pay a mortgage. A minute's silence cannot provide rehabilitation. A wreath cannot rebuild a shattered family. Remembrance therefore has to mean something more demanding than ceremony. It should mean justice where justice is possible. It should mean sustained medical, psychological and financial assistance. It should mean listening to survivors rather than speaking for them. It should mean protecting their dignity instead of turning their suffering into political ammunition.

And above all, it should mean consistency. The nationality, religion, ethnicity or politics of the victim must never determine the value we attach to their life. Terrorism does not become less monstrous because its victims are inconvenient to one political narrative, nor more monstrous because they fit comfortably into another.

Every innocent victim deserves the same moral arithmetic: one human life is one human life. That principle is increasingly difficult to defend in an age of tribal politics, algorithmic outrage and geopolitical propaganda. Yet precisely because it is difficult, it matters.

The International Day of Remembrance should therefore be more than another date on the international calendar. It should be a challenge to our collective memory. Remember the names. Remember the families. Remember the survivors.

And remember that terrorism's greatest victory would not be the destruction of a building or the killing of innocent people. It would be convincing the living to become permanently afraid, permanently divided and permanently incapable of seeing one another's humanity. The answer to terror must therefore be something terrorists cannot manufacture: solidarity. Not for a day. For as long as the victims need it.

The country the world forgot by Avani Devi

Afghanistan has acquired the terrible quality of a place that can disappear from international attention without actually disappearing from suffering. Five years after the Taliban marched back into Kabul, the country is poorer, more repressive and now increasingly entangled in a dangerous confrontation with Pakistan. There is no shortage of catastrophe. What is missing is the sense that anyone expects an ending.

The numbers are grim enough to make even catastrophe sound bureaucratic. Roughly three quarters of Afghans were unable to meet basic needs in 2025. Millions require humanitarian assistance. Aid has been cut precisely when drought, economic stagnation and the return of millions of Afghans from neighbouring countries are placing additional pressure on communities that already have very little left to give.

But poverty is only one part of Afghanistan's tragedy. The Taliban have constructed something more ambitious than an authoritarian government: a society in which half the population has been progressively removed from public life. Girls cannot proceed beyond basic schooling. Women face restrictions on education, employment, movement and public participation. A country cannot amputate half its intellectual and economic capacity and then seriously wonder why it remains poor.

The Taliban nevertheless present themselves as the guardians of order. And, to be fair, Afghanistan is less consumed by the nationwide warfare that defined much of the previous two decades. But there is a peculiar authoritarian arithmetic at work here: fewer battles do not necessarily mean more freedom, prosperity or hope. A prison is also a relatively quiet place.

Now Pakistan has become another source of danger. The old relationship between Islamabad and the Taliban has deteriorated into something resembling an armed family quarrel conducted with artillery. Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of sheltering militants who attack Pakistan; the Taliban deny the charges and have retaliated militarily. Civilians, naturally, have been invited to absorb the consequences. Hundreds have been killed and more than a thousand wounded in the fighting documented over recent months.

This is particularly grotesque because Afghanistan scarcely possesses the economic strength to repair a broken road, let alone sustain another war. Yet history has never required countries to be sensible before they become entangled in wars.

Pakistan, meanwhile, appears to be discovering the classic problem of trying to solve a security nightmare by creating a larger one. Bombing Afghanistan may satisfy immediate military calculations, but it cannot manufacture a stable neighbour. It can instead strengthen precisely the forces whose existence Pakistan fears.

And somewhere beneath all this geopolitical theatre is the Afghan citizen: the shopkeeper counting coins, the farmer watching the sky for rain, the mother calculating whether there will be enough food tomorrow, the girl learning secretly because the state has decided that her education is a political offence.

The international community has no magic solution. Military intervention is neither credible nor desirable. Recognition of the Taliban without meaningful conditions risks rewarding repression. Abandonment, however, is not a policy; it is merely neglect with better public relations.

Afghanistan needs sustained humanitarian assistance, pressure for women's rights, support for education and diplomacy capable of preventing the Pakistan conflict from becoming another permanent war. Above all, Afghans need the world to remember that their country is not a finished story.

The most dangerous thing about Afghanistan today is not that there is no hope. It is that the rest of the world is becoming accustomed to the absence of it. That is how forgotten countries become permanent tragedies.

Ghostin’ #134 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They are like neighbours we are aware of,
except we are NOT aware of and
they have absolutely nothing to do with Halloween.

For more Ghostin’, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The politics of “thoughts and prayers” by Sidney Shelton

There is something ritualistic about the response to a mass shooting. First comes shock. Then condolences and then invariably the sentence, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.”

Thailand has apparently decided to experiment with another sentence: “Let’s change the law.” After a 14-year-old boy killed his grandparents before going to school and shooting six people there, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul moved to tighten the country’s gun controls. New firearm purchase licences have been suspended, existing licences are being reviewed, and the government says it wants tougher rules governing guns and their circulation.

This is not revolutionary. It is, however, unfashionable in certain countries. The United States, in particular, has perfected political choreography in which the dead are mourned with eloquence while the living are left to negotiate lethal machinery. The country has produced a vocabulary for this performance: thoughts and prayers, healing, heroes, evil, mental health, “now is not the time.” The vocabulary is expansive; legislative results are often less so.

The peculiar achievement is that nobody has to admit nothing will change. Thoughts are wonderfully adaptable. They require no committee hearings, no votes, no constitutional arguments, no confrontation with a gun lobby, no examination of licensing systems, storage requirements or the difference between owning a weapon and carrying one into a crowded public place. Prayers have an administrative advantage. They can be dispatched immediately, require no budget allocation and cannot be accused of infringing anyone’s rights.

But a prayer cannot lock a gun in a safe. Nor can a candlelight vigil determine whether a teenager can obtain a firearm, whether an adult who owns one stores it responsibly, whether authorities know how many weapons are circulating illegally, or whether a licence should ever have been granted in the first place.

Thailand’s response deserves attention precisely because it is imperfect. No law will abolish violence, madness, despair or human cruelty. A determined killer will always look for another route. But this is a remarkably poor argument against making the easiest route harder.

There is also an uncomfortable lesson in the age of the perpetrator. Fourteen. A child old enough to kill, but still young enough to be legally incapable of many adult decisions. Yet the weapon was available. That should provoke questions about the adults, systems and assumptions surrounding the weapon.

Gun control is not really simply about guns. It is about deciding what a society considers an acceptable level of preventable risk.

Every society makes such calculations. We require seat belts. We regulate medicines. We inspect buildings. We license drivers. We put fences around dangerous machinery. We do not describe these measures as an attack on freedom because freedom without rules eventually becomes merely the freedom to be injured by someone else's negligence.

So when Thailand responds to a massacre with legislation rather than exclusively with lamentation, the rest of the world should watch. Especially those countries where the tragedy can happen again, the same flowers can be placed outside another school, the same flags can be lowered, and the same politicians can solemnly promise that they are praying. Perhaps, after enough funerals, prayer should be permitted to take a day off. Action could use the microphone.

The politics of the dry tap by Solomon Mensah

Johannesburg has discovered an unusually effective way of turning water into a political weapon, stop delivering it. For a city accustomed to the grand language of African urban ambition, the indignity is almost comically basic. The skyscrapers remain. The shopping centres glitter. The highways crawl with expensive cars. Yet behind the gates and apartment doors, residents are increasingly learning to regard the household tap with the suspicion normally reserved for a politician's promise.

More than a third of Johannesburg's water supply is reportedly disappearing through leaks and bursts, an astonishing 655m litres a day. That is not merely an engineering problem. It is a civic insult. Water is one of those services whose importance becomes apparent precisely when government fails to provide it. Electricity can be replaced, briefly, with batteries and solar panels. A rubbish collection can be postponed. Water cannot be negotiated with.

The political consequences are therefore predictable. South Africans have become veterans of infrastructure failure. Power cuts taught households to buy inverters. Now water shortages are teaching them to buy tanks, filters and boreholes. The wealthy are constructing private versions of the public utility they have stopped trusting.

This is perhaps the most dangerous feature of Johannesburg's crisis. The rich are not merely suffering less from municipal failure; they are acquiring the means to escape it. Once a household has its own borehole, storage tanks and filtration system, the condition of the municipal network becomes an abstraction. The city may be collapsing next door, but the swimming pool remains full.

That creates a vicious economic circle. Those most capable of withdrawing from the public system have the strongest incentive to do so. Those left behind are poorer residents who cannot drill their way out of a crisis. The public utility consequently becomes more concentrated among people with fewer resources, while its political and financial foundations weaken.

It is difficult to imagine a better recipe for inequality. The Johannesburg water crisis should therefore not be understood simply as a drought story, nor as another chapter in the familiar catalogue of South African infrastructure woes. It is a story about the slow privatisation of citizenship. The affluent citizen becomes a customer of private solutions; the poor citizen remains a captive of public failure.

That distinction matters electorally. Local elections are usually fought over potholes, refuse collection, housing and electricity. Water is different. A pothole damages a car. A dry tap reorganises an entire household's day. Children cannot wash. Toilets become unusable. Cooking becomes complicated. Elderly people and vulnerable residents must depend on tankers or neighbours. The inconvenience becomes intimate.

And intimacy is what turns administrative incompetence into political anger. The governing African National Congress has particular reason to worry. Its long dominance has increasingly been tested by voters who no longer regard liberation credentials as an adequate substitute for competent municipal government. Johannesburg's water failures offer opposition parties a brutally simple argument: forget ideology; look at the tap.

Yet blaming politicians alone would be too comfortable. Johannesburg inherited old pipes, rising demand, urban expansion and enormous maintenance requirements. Climate change adds another layer of difficulty. But these facts explain the problem; they do not excuse the failure to anticipate it. Infrastructure does not collapse overnight. Pipes spend decades announcing their age.

Maintenance is politically dull because successful maintenance produces nothing photogenic. There is no ribbon-cutting ceremony for a pipe that does not burst. Politicians naturally prefer visible projects. Voters, however, eventually become interested in the invisible ones when the visible city can no longer function.

Johannesburg is approaching that moment. The great irony is that the city's wealth, which should make reliable water easier to provide, may instead make collective failure easier to tolerate, for some. Private boreholes, tanks and filtration systems can conceal a public crisis long enough for it to become permanent.

That is the real warning from the dry tap. A city does not need to run completely out of water to experience a Day Zero. It merely needs enough citizens to stop believing that the

The Muslim NATO question by Mira Radulova

Three countries have signed what may eventually prove to be more consequential than the diplomatic language surrounding it suggests. Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have agreed that an armed attack on one of them will be regarded as an attack on all three, a formula deliberately reminiscent of NATO’s Article 5. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement is not NATO, and nobody should mistake a communiqué for an integrated military machine. But history has a habit of beginning with paperwork.

The interesting question is not whether this is an “Islamic NATO” today. It plainly is not. The interesting question is whether it could become one tomorrow. The ingredients are unusually potent. Turkey brings a substantial conventional military, a growing defence industry and increasingly sophisticated drones. Pakistan brings a large, battle-tested armed force and the world’s only Muslim nuclear arsenal. Saudi Arabia brings money, strategic geography and the ability to finance the machinery that ambitious alliances invariably require. Put together, they form something considerably more interesting than another ceremonial friendship among governments.

And the choice of Mecca was hardly accidental. The symbolism practically writes its own editorial. Yet the alliance also contains a magnificent complication: its members do not agree on everything. They have different relationships with Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Jerusalem. Their strategic priorities overlap without being identical. Turkey remains a NATO member. Pakistan has deep military ties with China. Saudi Arabia has spent decades relying on American security architecture while simultaneously attempting to diversify its strategic partnerships.

That is precisely why the pact matters. It is less the birth certificate of an Islamic NATO than a declaration that the old security order is no longer sufficiently reassuring. For years, Washington was the indispensable security broker of the Middle East. Now its partners are discovering the unpleasant truth of dependency: a security guarantee is only as convincing as the political will behind it. The result is not necessarily an anti-American revolt. It is something more practical and potentially more consequential: insurance.

And once countries start buying insurance, they tend to discover that collective insurance is cheaper. The obvious candidates for a wider arrangement are intriguing. Egypt has already been mentioned as a possible future participant. Indonesia and Malaysia would bring something entirely different: enormous populations, strategic maritime geography and substantial political weight in Southeast Asia. Add Egypt, perhaps Qatar or other Gulf states, and eventually Indonesia or Malaysia, and the three-country experiment begins looking less like an eccentric triangle and more like the skeleton of a wider security organisation.

But here lies the danger. An alliance built around shared Muslim identity could easily become a security organisation in which religion substitutes for strategy. That would be a mistake. The most durable alliance is not one in which everyone believes the same things; it is one in which everyone understands exactly what happens when somebody is attacked.

NATO survived because Article 5 acquired credibility through institutions, planning, interoperability and decades of military integration. Three governments signing a document is the beginning of that process, not its conclusion.

Still, beginnings matter. The Middle East has spent decades importing its security architecture from elsewhere. The Mecca pact suggests that some of its powers now want to manufacture their own.

If that ambition spreads, the next map of the Muslim world may be drawn less by borders, sectarian arguments or oil fields and more by mutual defence commitments. That would not yet be an Islamic NATO. But it would be the moment when someone finally started building one.