So it seems like the most likely outcome of the Malaysian Airlines MH 370 flight has come to pass, and that it ended up in the ocean with no survivors. It is not clear that we will ever know what caused the loss since the plane is believed to be in one of the hardest to reach regions of the ocean.
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Breaking free of addictions such as alcohol, drugs, and smoking is hard and very often people who seek to do so enroll in the many 12-step programs modeled on the one made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous. Some judges even use such programs as part of their sentencing requirements.
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In popular media culture, when you have three similar things happening, then it automatically becomes transformed into a ‘thing’, a trend, something to be imitated and repeated and reported on until everyone gets sick to death of it.
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If you follow this link it will take you to ten short videos that were created as part of a study to see to what extent people give off cues as to whether they are lying or not. Each person was told to either tell the truth or lie in response of a question.
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A US District Court judge in Michigan became the latest in an unbroken string to strike down a state’s ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution’s equal protections clause.
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Der Spiegel has released another big story yesterday based on the Edward Snowden documents, this time targeting China’s top political leaders and companies that pose a threat to American technology companies. It seems likely that this news release was timed to coincide with Michelle Obama’s current visit to China so that the news would have maximum impact.
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In a comment on my post about voiceover artists, reader Anthony Burber referred me to an interesting article by a middle-school teacher Jessica Lahey who was concerned about the number of girls in her class who had an ‘upspeak’ in their voices or, even worse, adopted childish voices.
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As the Edward Snowden revelations keep coming out about how the NSA and GCHQ and the rest of the ‘Five Eyes’ club have been pretty much spying on everyone including the leaders of foreign governments, there have been loud protestations about these practices by foreign leaders that this was being done without their knowledge and consent. As Glenn Greenwald poses the question: “Were these top officials truly unaware, or were they pretending to be, in order to distance themselves from surveillance operations that became highly controversial once disclosed?”
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It is fascinating to see the evolution of the 24/7 news channels when they seize on one event out of many to devote almost their entire coverage. If the issue is not resolved quickly, the nature of the coverage descends into more and more bizarre speculations, almost completely unhinged from reality. Often these stories are about missing young women but the current one about the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 follows that familiar pattern and the news channel HLN ended up having a psychic to tell viewers what she had ‘seen’. You can see the segment here.
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