There can be no doubt that Saudi Arabia has one of the worst governments n the world. It is a ruthless monarchy that ignores the basic human rights of its citizens, persecutes the LGBT community, treats women as second class and its immigrant low-level workers like chattel, and has a punitive and barbaric judicial system that dates back to the Dark Ages. It deserves to be treated as an international pariah.
[Read more…]

This election has posed a serious problem for many voters in that the two major party candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have historically high disapproval ratings. What are those voters, especially on the progressive side, who are not tied rigidly to party loyalties supposed to do?
[Read more…]

The New York Times has an interesting article about the two weeks that Edward Snowden went missing, after he left his luxury hotel in Hong Kong and before he showed up in Moscow, when he was in hiding from the US government and the hordes of media reporters who were seeking him after him bombshell revelations about US spying. It turns out that his lawyers in Hong Kong had placed him in the homes of other clients who were refugees seeking asylum, people who lived in tiny apartments in some of the city’s poorest districts, and some of them were Sri Lankans.
[Read more…]

There seem to be two standard rules of political reporting when it comes to US presidential elections. One is that the media has a vested interest in a close race because that generates more interest in the news and thus more readers and viewers. Hence there is always more breathless reporting generated by positive news and polls favoring the candidate who is behind and negative news about the one who is ahead. So in the current race, where Donald Trump is behind, any poll that shows him close to or tied with Hillary Clinton gets wide coverage. But statistically, when two candidates are within three or four points of each other, there will always be some polls that show them to be tied or the one who is behind on average to be even ahead slightly, and the number of polls that show this in this race are what one might predict purely on statistics.
[Read more…]

There has been considerable hyperventilating in the US media and political circles about Russia supposedly trying to influence the outcome of the US election, though the government is careful to avoid going on the record with the allegations. This news report is full of such speculations based on anonymous sources.
[Read more…]

Some years ago, there was an odd feature of the scores on the SAT exam that students in the US take in large numbers and that many colleges use as one of their admission criteria. They found that the overall average SAT score was declining but that when the scores were disaggregated by ethnicity, the average scores of every subgroup (white, black, Hispanic, Asian) was rising.
[Read more…]