When president Obama announced the thaw in relations with Cuba, my guess is that many people would have been surprised that there was even an embargo with Cuba, since knowledge of foreign relations is not exactly the strong point of the public. But Obama seems to have a better feel for public opinion on this issue than those who are acting apoplectic over this development, with polls overwhelmingly supporting his move.
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Andrew Cockburn has an interesting article (paywall) in the January 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine where he talks about how the military industry, alarmed by the fact that the end of the Cold War led to a reduction in the need for things like fighter planes, tanks, and other highly profitable heavy armaments, set about creating a new cold war and succeeded.
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(Via Kelly Conaboy)
I have noticed that at some point when you try to point out to people that the wars they support (such as the US waging war all over the world or Israel unleashing assaults on Gaza) lead to the deaths of large numbers of innocent people, these people will sometimes resort to the cliché that “War is hell”.
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It has become routine to find out that virulent anti-gay pastors turn out to closeted gays themselves. It has happened so many times that I would not have bothered to comment on this latest episode of a pastor soliciting sex at a public place except for the fact that in this case the pastor’s first name is ‘Gaylard’.
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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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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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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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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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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