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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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.
"I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend."
Five years ago today, @BernieSanders attacked the legacy of Henry Kissinger in a presidential debate. pic.twitter.com/HLDHhRUcV4
— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) February 12, 2021
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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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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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.
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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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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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.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.4M tests, 95k cases, 76,979 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and 3,445 deaths. pic.twitter.com/Xf4PEK0Tl8
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) February 10, 2021
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.
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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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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