The Los Angeles Times published a grim tale of someone who got trapped in the Kafkaesque world occupied by those on the infamous ‘no fly list’.
For two weeks, Rehan Motiwala, a 29-year-old medical student from Pomona, sat stranded at the Bangkok airport, sleeping for 10 nights on a roach-infested mattress in a dank, windowless detention room reserved for deportees. [Read more…]
The Guardian reveals how software companies secretly gave access to the NSA to their customers’ information. What is revealed includes things such as:
The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a major cross-national study of “the health status of the United States and to compare US health outcomes with those of 34 OECD countries.”
The good news? “Overall, population health in the United States improved from 1990 to 2010. Life expectancy at birth and HALE [Healthy Life Expectancy] increased and all-cause death rates at all ages decreased.”
The bad news? [Read more…]
The phenomenon of ‘sockpuppetry’, the creation of alternate characters by an individual to create the impression of greater support for that person or that person’s point of view than is actually the case, is something that I have written about before. (See here, here, and here.) [Read more…]
By necessity I have become somewhat of a connoisseur of how the government manipulates the media and public opinion. One of the things that I have repeatedly emphasized is their technique of, whenever they are caught doing something wrong or criminal or even merely embarrassing, they immediately put out an alternative and more sensational story that is meant to shift the focus the discussion away from what they got caught doing. [Read more…]
For some reason, I find certain phrases particular jarring. Three that immediately come to mind are:
“In any way, shape, or form”
“The last time I checked”
“Make no mistake about it” [Read more…]
The biggest waste of wars lies in the loss of human lives, not to mention the trauma that war inflicts on those who have to live through it. But in addition, wars also waste immense amounts of money that could have been so much better used to improve the lives of the people in those countries made their lives so much better. Instead, wars destroy what infrastructure they have so the people in war-torn countries are harmed in multiple ways. [Read more…]
Remember the recent revelations of how Yeshiva University covered up sexual abuse by faculty of students for decades and that led to the chancellor resigning? [Read more…]
One of the odd things about the state of politics is that the views of politicians almost always lag behind that of the voters since it takes time to throw out an incumbent who longer represents the views of his or her constituency. But usually the views of voters on major issues change slowly enough over time that this discrepancy is not glaring [Read more…]