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Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Articles like to use photographs to liven up their appearance. But getting your own photographs is time-consuming and expensive so many publications resort to using stock images from the various sources that provide them and that can be easily searched on to provide one that seems to most closely fit the needs of the article. But Adam Jonson at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) has noticed that not enough care seems to go into selecting images and that, for example, a single trope tend to dominate in reports about Iran that perpetuate myths about that country.
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Some time ago, I read a piece by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo that anyone who comes into the vicinity of Donald Trump ends up having their reputation trashed because they get forced to do things that they would not otherwise do simply to stay on in their jobs. That article was in the context of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who according to Marshall, had a good reputation before his role in the firing of James Comey was revealed.
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The US is now in a state of permanent undeclared war in large parts of the globe. This has become such a routine practice that people at the highest levels of government, including those charged with oversight of the military, do not know where troops are stationed, how many, and what their purpose is. The US military is like a war virus, quietly spreading over the globe, out of sight from anyone except a few people in the military and the administration.
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Like with many other public health crises, the opioid epidemic is frequently thought of as having just somehow happened, the result of a confluence of unintended consequences for which no single individual or corporation is really at fault but that must now be dealt with collectively. But journalist Christopher Glazek in a long article in Esquire magazine, traces how the secretive Sackler family, through their private company called Purdue Pharma in the US and Napp Pharmaceuticals in the UK that invented OxyContin, downplayed the risks of addiction and exploited doctors’ confusion over the drug’s strength and, helped create the opioid crisis. What they did was take the drug and market it as the salve for a wide array of problems, the same strategy they had used earlier to make Valium a huge marketing success.
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The First Circuit Court of Appeals has, in a 2-1 decision, overturned a federal district court opinion that a big cross on public land in Maryland did not violate the Establishment Clause. The cross is 40 ft high and was erected in 1925 in memory of soldiers who died in World War I. The case was brought by the American Humanist Association, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the Center for Inquiry. You can read the opinion here.
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There were some who hoped that the appointment of general John Kelly as the White House chief of staff would bring some semblance of normalcy and order to a chaotic administration run by a pathological liar. But the recent events surrounding the telephone call made by Donald Trump to the widow of one of the soldiers killed in Niger reveal that Kelly is as much a delusional and shameless liar as his boss, perfectly willing to falsely attack someone in defense of the indefensible.
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As confrontations between neo-Nazi and white supremacists continue at various locations around the country, there was an interesting moment at the most recent one at the University of Florida where counter-protestors vastly outnumbered the neo-Nazis. For some reason, a white skinhead walked right into a crowd of counter-protestors and initially there was a fight where he was punched. But then this burly black guy enveloped the skinhead in a bear hug, holding him tightly and repeatedly saying “Give me a hug!”
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When Samantha Powers praises an article by Cass Sunstein, tweeting it as “important and enlightening”, you can be pretty sure that it is utter tripe. Why? Because these two are leading members of the neoliberal faction that has dominated the Democratic party and is trying hard to make sure that their stranglehold is not weakened by the progressives organizing around Bernie Sanders.
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