Take a look at a graph created by Dara Lind using official prison statistics about the number of prisoners in the US per 100,000 adult US residents. The rates now are nearly seven times what they were for nearly an entire century, from 1880 to 1970, when it suddenly shot up when ‘law and order’ and ‘get tough on crime’ became the way to win votes.
[Read more…]
Whenever there is a mass shooting of random people, as occurs all too frequently in the US, people immediately seize on the issue of the mental health of the gunman (it is almost always a man). Some use it purely opportunistically, in order to deflect attention away from the easy accessibility of guns in the US that enables individual to obtain an arsenal of lethal weaponry with far less effort and time than it takes to get (say) a driver’s license.
[Read more…]
I watched the debate last night. I thought it was a bit of a mess with the moderators not really doing their job. The entire debate was to have been focused on economic issues. Surely the moderators should have looked closely at each candidate’s taxing and spending policies and had the numbers at the ready to challenge them when they made absurd claims?
[Read more…]
I am back from my break. During this time, I was in Sri Lanka with my wife, older daughter, and her husband to attend a big family reunion. I grew up with a large and close-knit group of cousins. Sri Lanka being a small country, even though we lived in different parts of it, it was easy for us to all get together regularly. School holidays would see many of us spend extended periods of time in one another’s homes where our aunts and uncles treated us like their own children, and the bonds that we forged when young are strong.
[Read more…]
It is time for me to take a break from writing in order to recharge my writing batteries so I will not be blogging for the next week to ten days and instead doing other things. I am hoping to spend much of that time completely absent from the internet to see what it feels like! Given the rapid speed of information flow in these days, being away for even 10 days may make me feel like Rip Van Winkle when I return.
See you all when I come back!
I couldn’t watch last night’s debate because CNBC allowed online access only to those who were cable TV subscribers. I did follow some live blogs that covered it and it seemed to be pretty chaotic, light on substance, and heavy on attacks on the media. What everyone seemed to be agreed upon is that the debate moderators were terrible.
[Read more…]
I found this clip from back in 2009 where the late comedian talked to Tavis Smiley about how the country really works. He points out that by limiting the number of actual choices that people have about the major things that affect their lives, they can be more easily controlled. And they are aided in this by the collusion of the media, the politicians, and the legal system.
[Read more…]
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is reporting that another one of their hospitals has been bombed. This time it is in Yemen where Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition of states that is seeking to restore the government that was toppled by rebels. This follows the bombing of an MSF hospital in Afghanistan by the US and the bombing of a Syrian hospital by the Russians.
[Read more…]
I like to insert quotes in my writings because it spices things up. But I have learned from bitter experience that one needs to check carefully the sourcing of a quote because some of them, especially well-known ones, are fake in that the alleged authors never actually said them, though in blog posts that are rushed I sometimes forget to practice the required due diligence.
[Read more…]
Assaf Gavron, a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces, has written an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled Confessions of an Israeli traitor arguing that the harsh occupation by Israel of the West Bank and its brutal treatment of people there and in Gaza is destroying Israel. He said that things have changed a lot since the days when the IDF soldiers responded with merely tear gas and rubber bullets to angry teenage stone throwers. The use of violence against protestors is much harsher and more lethal now.
[Read more…]