Mitch McConnell is a real weasel

Trump was acquitted of the impeachment charges by the US senate because despite the fact that a sizable bipartisan majority of 57-43 found him guilty, the rules require a super majority of at least 67-33 to convict. I am willing to speculate that almost all of them believed him to be guilty of the charge but were scared to convict him for fear of angering Trump and repercussions from his cult followers. So they seized upon the fig leaf that is is unconstitutional to convict someone who is no longer in office, an argument that not only is absurd on its face but was roundly rejected by a large number of legal scholars and was even rejected by a majority senate vote of 56-44 before the trial started.
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The awful Neera Tanden set to join Biden administration

Joe Biden has nominated Neera Tanden to the head the Office of Management and Budget, an important position in the administration. She is an awful person for a multiplicity of reasons, as Max Blumenthal explains, but Democrats are likely to go along with her nomination while Republicans will focus on how mean she was to them, with both ignoring the very real and substantive reasons why she should be nowhere near high office.
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Flashback: “Henry Kissinger is not my friend”

I was pleased to be reminded of this great moment from one of the debates between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic campaign that showed once again why she was such an awful candidate. How anyone could value the friendship of that war criminal and see him as a mentor beats me.

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.
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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.
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Postage stamp honoring C. S. Wu

If asked to name a famous female physicist, the name Marie Curie is the one most likely to come to mind. But there are many others and one of the people who should be much better known is Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997), who used to be often referred to as Madame Wu.

It was her careful experimental work that showed that parity violation did indeed occur, as predicted by theoretical physicists Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee. Yang and Lee received the Nobel prize for this in 1957 but Wu’s contribution was not recognized, an omission that has been widely criticized.

Wu was a remarkable physicist who did receive many other honors, as can be read in this biographical article. She was the first Chinese-American elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1958 and in 1967 she served as the first female president of the American Physical Society.

Yesterday, on the occasion of the sixth International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the U.S. Postal Service issued a new forever stamp to honor her.

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.
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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.
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Cautious optimism about the pandemic

There is a glimmer of light in the pandemic darkness. The number of hospitalizations has been dropping and is close to half of what it was at its peak in early January. The number of deaths is also dropping.

But the current figures are still well above the previous peak values in the spring and summer of 2020.

We should also be concerned that people will take this news as license to let their guard down and that could cause yet another spike, which is what happened after numbers came down last summer.