The statistics on rape in the US are truly horrible. On average, a woman is raped every two minutes and every year about 32,000 women get pregnant because of rape. One needs to keep those numbers in mind to understand why Republican Senate candidates like Richard Mourdock (who thinks that rape is god’s will) and Todd Akin keep saying these crazy things that either minimize rape or suggest that women were asking for it or simply have to deal with the consequences. They cannot stomach allowing that many abortions. And they are by no means the only such people in the Republican party. [Read more…]

In my book The Achievement Gap in US Education, I emphasized the distortions in thinking that can occur when people unquestioningly take the performance or behavior of one group (usually the majority group) as the norm and/or desirable, and evaluate all other groups by how they compare with that standard. [Read more…]

I have been railing at the use of drone attacks that have killed so many innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and possibly other countries that we have not heard about. But since there is bipartisan consensus on this issue in the US, there has been hardly any serious discussion here, as can be seen from the fact that it has not been a factor at all in the election. [Read more…]

Documentarian Laura Poitras is one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, the so-called ‘Genius’ awards. Poitras is working on the last of a trilogy about the post-9/11 war on terror. The first one My Country, My Country is about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the elections in that country is 2005. It was nominated for an Academy Award. Here is the trailer. [Read more…]

Starting October 16, we are currently going through the 50th anniversary of the 13 days in 1962 during which Cuban missile crisis grabbed the attention of the world and seemed to bring us to the brink of a nuclear war. [Read more…]

Remember Joe the Plumber, whose brief casual interaction with candidate Barack Obama in 2008 shot him to stardom in Tea Party circles when John McCain repeatedly praised him in a subsequent debate? [Read more…]

On a program on MSNBC’s Morning Joe following Monday’s debate, co-host Joe Scarborough was musing uneasily about the significant new developments in warfare that the current drone program has created, where someone in America operating a joystick can blow up people half a world away, with widespread death inflicted upon people who just happen to be near the target. This was a topic that was passed over without discussion in the debate. [Read more…]