There have recently been a few high profile cases of plagiarism, the latest being Fareed Zakaria, who quickly admitted to the offense and apologized and whose TV show was initally suspended for a month as a punishment but quickly brought back. He has also resigned from Yale University’s Governing Board. [Read more…]
The media has to stop this practice of labeling anything controversial said by a politicians (or the one-percenters) as a ‘flub’ or a ‘gaffe’. Those labels should be reserved for either honest mistakes or for statements that were intended but have fairly trivial consequences. For a politician, confusing the names of the leaders of foreign countries is a gaffe. It does not tell us much about what the person’s views on foreign policy are. But saying something that you believe does not become transformed into a gaffe simply because it gets you in hot water. [Read more…]
The latest news from Pakistan lends further support to the impression that it is coming further under the sway of vigilante Islamic groups that are terrorizing those who offend their delicate sensibilities. [Read more…]
There are a lot of crazy people out there. An Ipsos Global Public Affairs survey conducted for the Reuters news agency finds that one in 7 (14%) of the global population believes that the world will end in their lifetime. About 10% associate this with the so-called Mayan calendar prophecy that supposedly signals the end of the world on December 21, 2012, totally ruining the Christmas holidays. [Read more…]
In one of his last posts for Salon before he moves to The Guardian today, Glenn Greenwald takes on with his trademark comprehensiveness the sham, self-serving ‘terrorism expert’ industry, something that Ken Silverstein has also written about for Harper’s. [Read more…]
Thanks to sophisticated polling techniques, presidential elections in the US have narrowed their attention to not just the few so-called ‘swing states’, but to the handful of undecided voters in those states who can swing an election either way. They are the players while the rest of us have become spectators. So who are these undecided voters that so much attention is lavished over? [Read more…]
I wrote recently about the rapid decline in religion in Ireland. Thanks to reader Peter, I was able to track down the report of the much larger survey from which that information was gleaned. The survey was done in 2012 by WIN-Gallup International which asked over 50,000 people in 57 nations across five continents the following question: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?” [Read more…]
No serious observer of US politics thinks that Fox News is anything but a highly partisan propaganda operation that serves as the mouthpiece of the oligarchy. But they usually try to maintain a façade of being a news organization. [Read more…]
Anyone who has a dog as a pet knows to avoid getting close to them when they are wet because they have a remarkable ability to shake themselves in such a way that the water flies off and drenches everything nearby. The interesting questions are why they do that and how they do that. [Read more…]