The US media provides cover for the US government, again

The US government still continues to defy calls for an independent investigation into the attacks on the MSF hospital in Kunduz that destroyed the main facility and killed so many, and the US media are not putting any pressure on them to do so. What is worse, as Glenn Greenwald points out, some in the media are pre-emptively exonerating the government by declaring that the attack was an ‘accident’ or ‘mistake’ when there are many indications that the attack on the hospital was deliberate.
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The curious case of Benjamin Carson

While I was traveling, I read various foreign newspapers and many of them had articles about Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. While they were generally baffled by the rise of Donald Trump as a leading presidential contender, Carson’s rise to the top seemed to leave them utterly astounded. There is no question that he is the most fascinating candidate in the field because there is something really weird about him, and I am not just talking about the way he speaks, with his eyes often closed and giving the impression of one who is either sedated or stoned.
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Giving criminals a second chance

Take a look at a graph created by Dara Lind using official prison statistics about the number of prisoners in the US per 100,000 adult US residents. The rates now are nearly seven times what they were for nearly an entire century, from 1880 to 1970, when it suddenly shot up when ‘law and order’ and ‘get tough on crime’ became the way to win votes.
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The opportunistic attention given to mental health

Whenever there is a mass shooting of random people, as occurs all too frequently in the US, people immediately seize on the issue of the mental health of the gunman (it is almost always a man). Some use it purely opportunistically, in order to deflect attention away from the easy accessibility of guns in the US that enables individual to obtain an arsenal of lethal weaponry with far less effort and time than it takes to get (say) a driver’s license.
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Back to blogging!

I am back from my break. During this time, I was in Sri Lanka with my wife, older daughter, and her husband to attend a big family reunion. I grew up with a large and close-knit group of cousins. Sri Lanka being a small country, even though we lived in different parts of it, it was easy for us to all get together regularly. School holidays would see many of us spend extended periods of time in one another’s homes where our aunts and uncles treated us like their own children, and the bonds that we forged when young are strong.
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Blogging hiatus

It is time for me to take a break from writing in order to recharge my writing batteries so I will not be blogging for the next week to ten days and instead doing other things. I am hoping to spend much of that time completely absent from the internet to see what it feels like! Given the rapid speed of information flow in these days, being away for even 10 days may make me feel like Rip Van Winkle when I return.

See you all when I come back!

George Carlin on how our system really works

I found this clip from back in 2009 where the late comedian talked to Tavis Smiley about how the country really works. He points out that by limiting the number of actual choices that people have about the major things that affect their lives, they can be more easily controlled. And they are aided in this by the collusion of the media, the politicians, and the legal system.
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