The issue of dress codes is one that arouses strong passions. Part of the problem is the gender bias involved. What women wear comes under much closer scrutiny than what men wear and the stringent dress codes that Muslim (and Orthodox Jewish) women must operate under in many parts of the world is one of the hottest of issues. In 35 nations some form of veiling of women is compulsory. [Read more…]
It is easy to say that the Republicans lost the presidential election in 2012 because their nominee Mitt Romney was a lousy candidate. And he likely was. But I think that we pay too much attention to the personality of the candidates and not enough to the structural features of campaigns, and it is the latter that I want to focus on. [Read more…]
The front page of the Sunday edition of a major Brazilian newspaper O Globo today had the headline “US spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilians” and was a story about how the NSA was spying on the communications of millions of Brazilians. (Rough English translation here.) This story was also provided by Edward Snowden, just as the earlier Der Spiegel story about spying on Germans. [Read more…]
It has been established that the number of people in the US who self-identify as unaffiliated with any religion is steadily on the rise, now reaching about 20%. One would expect that those who are religious would see it as a bad thing, while the non-religious would see this as a good thing, resulting in an 80-20% split as to whether this trend was bad or good. [Read more…]
A question that has been swirling around is how it could have happened that the European governments got it all wrong about Edward Snowden being on the Bolivian president’s plane and caused them, in what can be described as an act of air piracy, to close their airspace and force it to land in Austria, creating a backlash around the world at what was seen as a naked act of western imperialism and colonialism. [Read more…]
Ari Mandel was an observant Hassidic Jew until the age of 23. Then he became an atheist. Now 31, he decided that since he was no longer going to heaven, the spot that had once been reserved for his soul was now vacant and so he decided to put it up for sale on eBay. [Read more…]
One of the interesting questions is how it came to be that the Guardian has become such a major player in international media. It is, after all, at its core a relatively small British newspaper with a daily print circulation of around 160,000. And yet it has broken major story after major story, sidelining ostensibly bigger players like the Washington Post and the New York Times. It was the leader in publishing the WikiLeaks documents, it uncovered Rupert Murdoch’s illegal phone tapping, and now it has been the clear leader in revealing Edward Snowden’s documents. [Read more…]
While the LGBT community is making headway in gaining acceptance in the western hemisphere, things are still bleak in the rest of the world. It looks like the nations in the continents of Africa (with the exception of South Africa where same sex marriage is legal) and Asia and the Middle East may well end up being the last to accept the reality. [Read more…]
It looks like forcing down the Bolivian president’s plane on its return from Russia was a big blunder that has backfired badly on the US. It has angered many of the governments of that region, bringing back painful memories of how the US treated them in the past. [Read more…]