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.

Round two of my conflict with turkeys

Readers may recall my earlier close encounter with the wild turkeys that wander around the housing complex where I live. We could call that encounter a draw. But a couple of days ago, I had a rematch with one of them and this time the turkey was clearly the victor.

What happened was that I was going out somewhere and as I started driving on the road that exits the complex, I saw four turkeys ahead of me, straddling the road. I stopped to let them move on but turkeys are pretty casual about getting out of the way of cars and just hung around. After waiting some time, I drove around them but one of them took umbrage at this act of disrespect and chased after my car. I sped up and left it behind.
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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.
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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.
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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.