Age is no excuse for casual sexist remarks

The head of Tokyo’s Olympic organizing committee Yoshiro Mori gave as his reason for opposing naming more women directors that “women talk too much”.

The remarks set off a firestorm of protest and Mr Mori apologised at the time but said he would not resign.

But on Friday he apologised for his “inappropriate statement”.

“What is important is to hold the Olympics from July. It must not be the case that my presence becomes an obstacle to that,” he said at a special committee meeting on Friday, where he also announced his resignation.
[Read more…]

Trump’s Folly

As part of his xenophobic, racist, nativist, anti-immigrant campaign, Trump pushed for a ‘big, beautiful wall’ along the border that Mexico would pay for. Like most of that blowhard’s promises, it was a sham. The useless wall is neither big nor beautiful nor did Mexico pay for it. Trump built a total of 453 miles of wall but many parts of it were not contiguous making it even more useless. Worse, the process of construction led to the carving of access roads and blasting staging areas that left horrible scars on a pristine, beautiful landscape, scars that will lead to further erosion over time. I hope this becomes known as Trump’s Folly.
[Read more…]

How having the death penalty delays trials

The death penalty should be abolished because it is a barbaric practice. I wrote yesterday about the renewed drive to abolish it and later I came across this article that provides another reason to end it, in that prosecutors demanding the penalty results in trials being delayed. This arose in the case of the student who went on a rampage in a high school in Parkland, FL.

It’s been more than 1,000 days since a gunman with an AR-15 rifle burst into a Florida high school, killed 17 people and wounded 17 others.

Yet, with Valentine’s Day on Sunday marking the three-year milestone, the trial of 22-year-old Nikolas Cruz is in limbo.
[Read more…]

Sri Lanka yesterday may be the US tomorrow

Over time I have noticed that political developments in the US show a pattern that is similar to that of Sri Lanka in the way that democratic norms get eroded, except that there is a lag of a decade or two. Sri Lanka has been a democracy since it obtained independence in 1948 but it has periodically come under great strain as various leaders and parties tried to undermine the institutions of democracy in order to obtain short-term political gain. Undermining the independence of the judiciary and the media and using the instruments of state power to the advantage of the party in power have all been features that I saw in Sri Lanka back in the day and I see in the US now.
[Read more…]

Moving to end the death penalty

There were many things that I hated about the Trump administration but one of the most gratuitously revolting things was how in its last days, we had the grotesque spectacle of Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr rushing through the executions of people on federal death row. There was absolutely no reason for this killing spree except that with Joe Biden being against the death penalty, Trump and Barr mush have feared that those people might be reprieved once Biden came into office. Trump and Barr did not want to give them any chance of life. It was truly sickening. One should never take away someone’s life. To rush to do so when you did not have to reveals the existence of a deeply disturbed mentality.
[Read more…]

Jimmy Kimmel on the first days’s impeachment proceedings

He gave a pretty good summary of what went down.

It is interesting how the various late night talk shows are emerging from the pandemic lockdowns. Kimmel and Samantha Bee are back to what it was like before, wearing formal outfits and standing on stage in their studios, though without a large live audience. Seth Meyers is back at his desk on the studio stage but still dressed casually. Stephen Colbert is also dressed casually and in his office. Trevor Noah is the most casual. He looks like he may be still at home, though it may be his studio office. He dresses in a hoodie and is unshaven and letting his hair grow out.

Another useless Republican post-mortem?

After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, an election that Romney and the Republicans thought they would win and were so confident that they were shocked by the result, the party did what they called an ‘autopsy’ about the loss and what they needed to do to win in the future. Their conclusion? The party’s policies were fine but they needed to make a greater effort to get their message out and to be more inclusive.
[Read more…]

The powerful case against Trump

In today’s opening statement at the impeachment trial against Trump taking place in the Senate chambers, the people making the case for Trump to be convicted on the impeachment charges showed a powerful video taken from many sources that interspersed Trump’s speech on January 6th to the mob with the processing within the Capitol building where the Electoral College votes were being certified and the mobs rioting is support of Trump.

You can see the video.

Trump’s defense team got off to such a bad start in their rebuttal that even Trump-supporting Newsmax and Trump-supporting Alan Dershowitz could not make any sense of what he was saying.

Trump is guilty as hell.

The conservative media bind

Conservative media like Fox News, One America News (OAN) and Newsmax are finding themselves in a bind. Since they are competing for the support of the Trump cult, they need to feed them the red meat about how the election was stolen. This requires them to bring on their shows the loonies who are propagating outlandish conspiracy theories.

But now that the two companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are unlashing massive lawsuits against those who they claim are defaming them, these media outlets have to take defensive actions. What they have chosen to do is to give detailed disclaimers before they put on these people, saying that these are not their opinions but purely those of the speaker.
[Read more…]

The myth of the Chinese debt trap

The US and China are now locked in a competition for global leadership. There is a prevailing narrative that the Chinese government is using its Belt and Road initiative to gain power over developing countries as it seeks to expand its geopolitical influence. Their alleged strategy is to offer countries low-interest loans for big infrastructure projects that it knows that the countries cannot pay back but will likely accept because of those countries’ leaders’ grandiose ambitions. When the countries later find it hard to service those loans and are on the brink of default, China steps in and takes control of the asset it financed, in the process making those countries subservient to them.
[Read more…]