Jeffrey Sachs has analyzed foreign policy for years. In this recent video, he is explaining that U.S. involvement in Syria was a terrible decision by Barack Obama, now perpetuated by Donald Trump.
I decided to create a new category today: "Research Tools" I wanted to create a place where I could find interesting places to find things. Here's the first entry, describing seven such places for high quality research: "7 Great Educational Search Engines for Students" It briefly describes the following: 1) Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) [M]aintained by the U.S. Department of Education. You’ll find more than 1.3 million bibliographic records of articles and online materials . . ." 2) Lexis Web Searches validated legal sites. 3) Google Scholar From Wikipedia: "Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines." 4) Microsoft Academic From MA: "Microsoft Academic understands the meaning of words, it doesn’t just match keywords to content." 5) Wolfram Alpha. From the website, "he introduction of Wolfram|Alpha defined a fundamentally new paradigm for getting knowledge and answers—not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms and methods." 6) iSeek Education From the website: "iSEEK Education is a targeted search engine for students, teachers, administrators, and caregivers." 7) ResearchGate From the website: "ResearchGate is built by scientists, for scientists.It started when two researchers discovered first-hand that collaborating with a friend or colleague on the other side of the world was no easy task."
Back in 2005, I took a look at fake abortion clinics--organizations that are set up to look like abortion clinics, but which are set up to actively discourage abortions. Thousands of these deceptive "clinics" are still operating and many of them are funded by tax dollars. John Oliver has dedicated this recent video to exposing many ways that theses "clinics" are fraudulent.
From an article titled, "There was no wave of compassion when addicts were hooked on crack." A nationwide case study is now laid out before us. It shows us that drug addictions are not treated equally.
Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked arms to save souls. Senators and CEOs, Midwestern pharmacies and even tough-on-crime Republican presidential candidates now speak with moving compassion about the real people crippled by addiction. It wasn’t always this way. Thirty years ago, America was facing a similar wave of addiction, death and crime, and the response could not have been more different. Television brought us endless images of thin, black, ravaged bodies, always with desperate, dried lips. We learned the words crack baby. Back then, when addiction was a black problem, there was no wave of national compassion. Instead, we were warned of super predators, young, faceless black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans.
To what extent are the issues really about the merits of the issues, rather than about tribal identities? Zaid Jilani's article at The Intercept nails it. The title: "A NEW STUDY SHOWS HOW AMERICAN POLARIZATION IS DRIVEN BY A TEAM SPORT MENTALITY, NOT BY DISAGREEMENT ON ISSUES."
THE LOOSE CONNECTION some voters have with policy preferences has become apparent in recent years. Donald Trump managed to flip a party from support of free trade to opposition to it by merely taking the opposite side of the issue. Democrats, meanwhile, mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for calling Russia the greatest geopolitical adversary of the United States, but now have flipped and see Russia as exactly that. Regarding health care, the structure of the Affordable Care Act was initially devised by the conservative Heritage Foundation and implemented in Massachusetts as “Romneycare.” Once it became Obamacare, the Republican team leaders deemed it bad, and thus it became bad. Mason believes the implications of such shallow divisions between people could make the work of democracy harder. If your goal in politics is not based around policy but just defeating your perceived enemies, what exactly are you working toward? (Is it any surprise there is an entire genre of campus activism dedicated to simply upsetting your perceived political opponents?) “The fact that even this thing’s that supposed to be about reason and thoughtfulness and what we want the government to do, the fact that even that is largely identity-powered, that’s a problem for debate and compromise and the basic functioning of democratic government. Because even if our policy attitudes are not actually about what we want the government to do but instead about who wins, then nobody cares what actually happens in the government,” Mason said. “We just care about who’s winning in a given day. And that’s a really dangerous thing for trying to run a democratic government.”