Skepticism grows about North Korean involvement in Sony hack

As time goes by, there is increasing skepticism over the US government’s claim that North Korea was behind the Sony hack. Fabius Maximus has compiled an extensive list of knowledgeable people who have poured cold water on that hypothesis. But it may be too late to overcome this narrative if it turns out to be false. As Mark Twain famously said, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” The propaganda system depends upon this fact and that is why the US government quickly rushes out its version of events, knowing that the pliant US media will parrot it as fact and the public will accept it. The Bush administration’s WMD lie is the most recent example of this, though there are many others. Remember the Kuwait incubator story? Gulf of Tonkin?
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Joe Cocker (1944-2014)

The British rock star died today at the age of 70 of lung cancer. No one who has seen it will forget his performance at the Woodstock music festival in 1969 where he took the Beatles’ With a little help from my friends, a gentle song sung by Ringo Starr, and turned into a weird, over-the top, air-guitar-playing, frenzied, incoherent performance that looked like he was having some kind of seizure.
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How prisoners spend their time

Like most people who have never served any time in jail, I have no idea what prison life is like. What one sees in films is likely to be highly exaggerated and thus unreliable. Daniel Genis, who spent a little more than ten years in prison, says that what characterizes prison is the large amount of leisure time that one has and what one does to combat the sheer boredom.
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We are a religious, torture-loving nation

It is bad enough that almost the entire top echelon of the Bush administration authorized, condoned, and even encouraged the most disgusting forms of torture and that the Obama administration is protecting these criminals. What is even worse is that surveys show that a majority of Americans actually support the CIA’s acts of torture by a margin of 59-31% and similar majorities think that torture produced useful information, that the torture report should not have been released, and that the people who committed torture should not be prosecuted.
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Absurd costs of health care system

Reporter Elisabeth Sullivan looks at how echocardiogram testing has become a lucrative source of money for medical practices in the US and is done even when there is no reason to do it but just because the machine is there. As Dr. Eric J. Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Health in San Diego who studies echocardiography says, “At many hospitals, the threshold for ordering an echocardiogram is the presence of a heart.”
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That must sting

You would think that by now, after all the lies that we have been told by the US government in its efforts to take the country into various wars, we would all have a healthy skepticism when officials blandly assert without providing the evidence that some country that they perceive as the enemy is responsible for some action. And yet here we are, with the media accepting at face value the assertions by US officials that North Korea is behind the Sony hack.
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The corrosive power of big athletic sports programs

Now that the season for college football bowl games and championship tournaments is underway, raising interest in college foot ball to a high pitch, I want to revisit a college football scandal that has been bothering me. While the Penn State sexual abuse scandal was a high water mark of how big college sports programs corrupt almost everything it touches, there are other abuses that are less high profile. One that is endemic, especially at those colleges with big sports programs, is the pressure to let athletes slide by academically with lower expectations in order for them to retain their eligibility.
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