Defying pressure to conform

It seems like periodically there occurs some incident that generates a wave of patriotic fervor. The latest is the decision by Colin Kaepernick, a football player for the San Francisco 49ers, who decided to not stand for the national anthem as a protest against the way that people of color are treated in this country. His protest has caught on with athletes around the country at all levels choosing to kneel instead of stand.
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Money in politics: What the secret John Doe files reveal

If any one still has any illusions that we are a nation of equals, this long and detailed expose by the Guardian about the way that wealthy individuals and corporations buy influence will help shatter it. (Thanks to reader Jason for the tip.) The looks at how the current campaign rules were exploited by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker at a time when he and some Republican state senators were facing recall elections. The money was laundered through a group known as the Wisconsin Club for Growth (WCfG).
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What’s the point of such things?

The Cleveland Orchestra is considered one of the best in the world. Like all classical music ensembles, it faces the problem that the audience for it is aging. In order to attract a younger and more diverse group, it engages in various programs that have more contemporary and popular music. One of the things that it advertises are things called Movie Nights that say that a film will be shown on a big screen in the concert hall with the score preformed live by the Cleveland Orchestra. They have had films like Back to the Future and the next one will be Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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The debate circus comes to town

The first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is due to take place on Monday, September 26. These are not debates in any real sense of the word but more like joint press conferences where occasional direct exchanges break out. The target audience for these debates is neither the people in the auditorium nor those watching at home or even the moderators asking the questions. Instead it is the talking heads who will, immediately following the event, blanket the airwaves for the next week or so, giving us their verdict about who won and who lost.
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A telling example of how the media works

Journalists and editors often get highly offended when it is suggested that they serve as the mouthpieces of the owners of the media institutions they work for. They protest that they write what they want to write about and that no one censors them or tells them to slant the reporting in a particular way. But as Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann pointed out in their brilliant analysis Manufacturing Consent (1988), that kind of explicit direction is not necessary. It is even counter-productive because such tightly controlled information systems are clearly seen as what they are, propaganda. To be truly effective as propaganda, those generating it have to believe that what they are saying is of their own volition, and this is why the western media works far better as a propaganda system than media where the state runs it.
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100 years of sandwiches

The invention of the sandwich, of putting stuff between two slices of bread, is credited to the fourth Earl of Sandwich John Montagu (1718-1792) though this is one of those things where the claim of being the first has to be taken with a huge grain of salt since the idea of using some kind of bread as a wrapper for other foods dates back much farther. But for whatever reason, justified or not, his name is associated with it.
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