Unlike Jude, Theresa May takes a sad song and makes it worse

Just when you thought that Theresa May had fouled things up so much that she had reached rock bottom, she managed to sink even lower. Yesterday she gave a televised address to the nation where she said that she was not at fault for the current mess and put it all on the members of parliament. (You can see her four-minute speech here, though for some reason the video starts with 44 minutes of showing just the podium.) It is true that parliament has voted down her proposed deal twice but it was hardly a profile in courage to pass the buck like this. MPs were understandably furious, saying that they were already worried about their safety because of threats against them and for May to throw them under the bus was unconscionable.
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On being a Muslim with a Jewish name

If you met someone who introduced himself as Bob Shabanowitz and tried to guess his ethnicity, the chances are that you would conclude that he is Jewish. But there is such a person and he is in fact a Muslim, descended from the Lipka Tatars in the Baltics, one of the Europe’s oldest Muslim communities, and that it is a common Muslim name in his native town as he discovered when he made a visit back there.
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Book review: Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Mechanics is Different by Philip Ball

(My review of the above book just appeared in the March 2019 issue of the American Journal of Physics (vol. 87, issue 4, p.319). You can access it here but I give the review below.)

A major problem with quantum mechanics is that the dominant Copenhagen interpretation is not conducive to providing visual images of what is going on. With special and general relativity, the initially unsettling ideas that time and distance are not invariants but depend upon the state of motion of the observer and that space can be warped by the presence of mass and energy have gone mainstream. Not so with quantum mechanics. Although of the same vintage as relativity, quantum mechanics has continued to greatly perplex people because it undermines the realist position that other theories, including relativity, take for granted, of a world existing independent of the observer, whose features we can discover by making observations. The denial of this made even Einstein uneasy.
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Pete Buttigieg is worth taking a close look

Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg is one of the Democratic candidates for president with lower name recognition. He was interviewed on the show Morning Joe about his candidacy and he was clear and articulate, despite facing vapid interviewers who asked the same old clichéd questions framed in trite ways. His responses were in general sharp, except for the one on North Korea that parroted the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment.

The interview is worth watching and he is worth watching because he is very young (just 37) and even if he does not win this time, is likely to be a significant factor in future elections. It is interesting that the fact that he is gay and married to another man is mentioned in passing and seen as just a trivial curiosity, except of course by the nutters who would never vote for a Democrat anyway. It shows how far we have come.

New Zealand is not free of racism and bigotry

The shocking murder of Muslims in two mosques in New Zealand by an Australian enabled the country’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern to make a claim that is familiar to us in the US whenever some ghastly act occurs, that ‘this is not us’. It is undoubtedly true that the gracious and warm and inclusive way that she responded to this tragedy reflects very creditably on her and on a country where the leader can say such things, especially when compared to the crass way that the US president responds to similar events
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The Brexit shambles has exposed the UK in more ways than one

British prime minister Theresa May has requested from the EU an extension of the current deadline of March 29 until June 30 to negotiate a Brexit agreement. This seems like far too short an extension. If the framework for a deal had been agreed upon and all that remained was to tie up loose ends, then three months may have been adequate. But the situation surrounding the current negotiations is nothing like that. Given that even after two years, they have failed to arrive at even the outlines of a deal that parliament can support, expecting it to happen in three more months seems wildly unrealistic.
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Hasan Minhaj on the Indian elections in May

Given the massive size of the country and the voting pool, Indian elections present formidable logistical challenges.

General elections in India will begin on April 11, officials announced on Sunday, with some 900 million voters eligible to cast ballots to fill parliamentary seats and choose the next prime minister in the world’s largest democracy.
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The chief election commissioner, Sunil Arora, said voting would be held in seven stages, staggered across the country, before polls closed on May 19. Ballot counting will begin on May 23 and is expected to be completed in a day.

Got that? Voting results are available the very next day whereas in the US some results take months.
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Why Dan Lipinski must be defeated in the next Democratic primary

I have written before about Democratic congressman Dan Lipinski, easily one of the worst Democrats in Congress, who occupies a seat that he ‘inherited’ from his father when the latter stepped aside to make room for him. In the 2018 election, he was challenged in the primary by a much better candidate Marie Newman but the Republican-lite Democratic party leadership threw its weight behind Lipinski even though Lipinski is pretty much opposed to everything that the Democratic party claims to represent.
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