The Washington Post seems to have decided to send its credibility into the dumpster by rushing into print with alarmist headlines any story that suggests that Russia is pretty much waging cyberwarfare on the US without bothering to do basic journalistic due diligence. The latest is a story that had the headline “Russians hackers penetrate U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, official say”, an alarming claim if it were true. (It has now added a disclaimer that undercuts its own story and even changed the headline to make it less scary.)
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One of the most shameful episodes of the Obama administration has been the way that they have treated whistleblowers. Chelsea Manning has been severely and inhumanely punished and even tortured for her courageous act in 2010 of releasing the infamous Collateral Murder video that showed US troops in a gunship cheerfully murdering Iraqis that were walking the streets and then attacking a vehicle containing children that came to their rescue. Edward Snowden has been targeted for his courageous release of documents that showed that the US and its allies have been systematically spying on people all over the world. And of course, Julian Assange and WIkiLeaks have been targeted because of their role in releasing the Manning video and other documents. Those who are hoping for Obama to pardon Manning and Snowden expect too much from someone who has shown a massively vindictive streak when it comes to punishing those who dare to show that he and the US government are not driven by noble motives but act cruelly and illegally as it suits them.
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There is a peculiar tendency in America with many phenomena (and maybe it exists in other countries too), that when the data are disaggregated by race, to see the statistics for whites as the norm and use the statistics of minorities as a measure of the problem. I made this point strongly in my book The Achievement Gap in US Education where I said such a way of thinking led to people, even well meaning ones, proposing solutions to the educational system that were misguided. Looked at in that way, they see nothing fundamentally wrong with the educational system (after all, whites are doing ok) and the problem lies with the black community for not taking advantage of the educational opportunities. I argued that there were fundamental problems with the entire system and that white students were also not being served well. As a result, they were underachieving but black students were underachieving even more, thus leading to the achievement gap. But by seeing the levels of white achievement as acceptable, the real problem of widespread underachievement were being ignored and wrong, and even harmful, measures being proposed
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In a post a week ago I wondered about how many of the impossible promises Donald Trump made during the campaign he could renege on or water down before his supporters would turn on him. I think he could get away with a lot. Republicans (and many Democrats too if we are honest) are notorious for being able to abandon their loudly stated principles when it serves their partisan needs, and Trump supporters seem even more extreme in their almost cult-like devotion to him personally than run-of-the-mill party members.
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There seems to be no limit to the ambitions of politicians to create grandiose projects that have no benefits to people. One example comes from India where the prime minister Narendra Modi has pushed for the construction of a massive statue in the Indian Ocean, about 4 km off the coast of Mumbai.
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