There are a lot of crazy people out there. An Ipsos Global Public Affairs survey conducted for the Reuters news agency finds that one in 7 (14%) of the global population believes that the world will end in their lifetime. About 10% associate this with the so-called Mayan calendar prophecy that supposedly signals the end of the world on December 21, 2012, totally ruining the Christmas holidays. [Read more…]
In one of his last posts for Salon before he moves to The Guardian today, Glenn Greenwald takes on with his trademark comprehensiveness the sham, self-serving ‘terrorism expert’ industry, something that Ken Silverstein has also written about for Harper’s. [Read more…]
Thanks to sophisticated polling techniques, presidential elections in the US have narrowed their attention to not just the few so-called ‘swing states’, but to the handful of undecided voters in those states who can swing an election either way. They are the players while the rest of us have become spectators. So who are these undecided voters that so much attention is lavished over? [Read more…]
I wrote recently about the rapid decline in religion in Ireland. Thanks to reader Peter, I was able to track down the report of the much larger survey from which that information was gleaned. The survey was done in 2012 by WIN-Gallup International which asked over 50,000 people in 57 nations across five continents the following question: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?” [Read more…]
No serious observer of US politics thinks that Fox News is anything but a highly partisan propaganda operation that serves as the mouthpiece of the oligarchy. But they usually try to maintain a façade of being a news organization. [Read more…]
Anyone who has a dog as a pet knows to avoid getting close to them when they are wet because they have a remarkable ability to shake themselves in such a way that the water flies off and drenches everything nearby. The interesting questions are why they do that and how they do that. [Read more…]
While a lot of the media focus in the run-up to the elections has been on domestic US politics, we should not ignore the fact that the government of Israel has been dropping hints of imminent war with Iran. As Stephen Walt says, Israel has raised the stakes by saying that they not only will they not let Iran develop nuclear weapons or the capability of making them, they will not even tolerate the Iranians having the theoretical capacity of doing so at some unspecified time down the road, a much lower threshold. [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert rips into a new reality show called Stars Earn Stripes.
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(This clip appeared on August 14, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan has generated much discussion of whether it will help energize the base of the Republican party and thus help them get more votes.
Cartoonist and essayist Ted Rall, no fan of Barack Obama, says that there is another aspect that is not being looked at as closely. [Read more…]