AMERICAN HERITAGE
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Posted:Aug 20, 2017 12:26 pm
Last Updated:Jan 3, 2022 4:00 pm 2215 Views
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WASHINGTON—Affirming their unwavering support for the fast food mascot, Americans rallied around a Ronald McDonald statue Thursday that they said embodied the country’s true heritage. “We refuse to let what this clown represents to our people and our way of life just be snuffed out,” said Jackson, MS resident Martin Kerpatch, one of the many demonstrators at a McDonald’s PlayPlace who had locked arms in a circle around the fiberglass sculpture of the iconic character relaxing on a bench. “You may not support everything this statue represents—we acknowledge that menu items such as the Arch Deluxe and McDLT complicate Ronald McDonald’s legacy—but to erase it from history would mean erasing the Big Mac and Chicken McNuggets as well. And we will never allow that to happen.” At press time, the protestors had begun swaying and chanting, “Ba da ba ba bah! I’m lovin’ it! Ba da ba ba bah! I’m lovin’ it!”
from the Onion
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DOMESTIC TERRORISM IN THE USA
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Posted:Aug 19, 2017 10:59 am
Last Updated:Jan 3, 2022 4:02 pm 2240 Views
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This is from the Washington Post......as an example of how the US Media would have written about recent US events if they happened in another country......Perhaps giving people on this site a glimpse into what it looks like to us foreigners.
"The international community is yet again sounding the alarm on ethnic violence in the United States under the new regime of President Trump. The latest flash point occurred this past weekend when the former Confederate stronghold of Charlottesville descended into chaos following rallies of white supremacist groups protesting the removal of statues celebrating leaders of the defeated Confederate states. The chaos turned deadly when Heather Heyer, a member of the white ethnic majority who attended the rally as a counterprotester, was killed when a man with neo-Nazi sympathies allegedly drove his car into a crowd.
Trump, a former reality television host, beauty pageant organizer and businessman, rose to political prominence by publicly questioning the citizenship of the United States’ first black president, Barack Obama. Since his election, Trump has targeted Muslims, refugees, Mexicans and the media. He has also advocated for police brutality. These tactics have appealed to and emboldened white ethno-nationalist groups and domestic terrorist organizations."
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EVOLUTION....THEORY OR THEORY ?
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Posted:Aug 1, 2017 6:52 pm
Last Updated:Jan 3, 2022 4:06 pm 2581 Views
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Today I saw a video of VP Pence making a speech about the "theory" of evolution.......How it is only a theory and then proceeded to use the wrong definition for the word......He is, according to that speech, a young earth creationist......He proceeded to elaborate on his theory that Evolution is just a theory. It's amazing to me that someone can rise to the position of VP in the US with absolutely no understanding of Scientific Theory......no wonder the EPA has been sacked.....Good Grief!!
Is Evolution a Theory or a Fact?
It is both. But that answer requires looking more deeply at the meanings of the words "theory" and "fact."
In everyday usage, "theory" often refers to a hunch or a speculation. When people say, "I have a theory about why that happened," they are often drawing a conclusion based on fragmentary or inconclusive evidence.
The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.
Many scientific theories are so well-established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics). Like these other foundational scientific theories, the theory of evolution is supported by so many observations and confirming experiments that scientists are confident that the basic components of the theory will not be overturned by new evidence. However, like all scientific theories, the theory of evolution is subject to continuing refinement as new areas of science emerge or as new technologies enable observations and experiments that were not possible previously.
One of the most useful properties of scientific theories is that they can be used to make predictions about natural events or phenomena that have not yet been observed. For example, the theory of gravitation predicted the behavior of objects on the moon and other planets long before the activities of spacecraft and astronauts confirmed them. The evolutionary biologists who discovered Tiktaalik predicted that they would find fossils intermediate between fish and limbed terrestrial animals in sediments that were about 375 million years old. Their discovery confirmed the prediction made on the basis of evolutionary theory. In turn, confirmation of a prediction increases confidence in that theory.
In science, a "fact" typically refers to an observation, measurement, or other form of evidence that can be expected to occur the same way under similar circumstances. However, scientists also use the term "fact" to refer to a scientific explanation that has been tested and confirmed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing it or looking for additional examples. In that respect, the past and continuing occurrence of evolution is a scientific fact. Because the evidence supporting it is so strong, scientists no longer question whether biological evolution has occurred and is continuing to occur. Instead, they investigate the mechanisms of evolution, how rapidly evolution can take place, and related questions.
From Science, Evolution, and Creationism, National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine. © 2008 National Academy of Sciences
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SHRINKING THE PRESIDENT
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Posted:Jul 29, 2017 9:10 pm
Last Updated:Jan 3, 2022 4:21 pm 2609 Views
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The Horrordome
Sam Kriss, July 28
Shrinking the President
The American Psychoanalytic Association gets to work
JUST HOW CRAZY IS DONALD TRUMP? It’s impossible to say. But you, the brave and fearless amateur diagnostician, are determined to find out. You sit the President of the United States down on a nice little chair, and he sprawls there with his edges bloating over the sides and his chin wobbling into his chest, and he talks to you. All the while you try to peer into that puckered little cat’s-anus of a mouth, as it folds itself open and closed—Russiah, Chai-nah, loser, very great, very, very great. It swallows you, binds you in saliva and menace, helpless in full cacoscopic fascination. And then you announce, after a brief dip into the DSM-5, with a behaviorist’s glibness, in a chattering chorus with every other sane person fussing over their own Donald Trump in his own little chair, the exact same thing as everyone else. Isn’t it obvious? Trump has dementia, psychosis, and most of all he has narcissistic personality disorder: grandiosity, “fantasies of infinite success,” resentment, hidden insecurities, “no form of empathy,” case closed. But you’ll never get Trump on your chair, and you’ll never be able to talk to him. All you have is his image, wittering away on a TV screen, because the TV screen is where he’s always lived. You were never analyzing the man, you were watching him on TV. And as you make your notes, you can see your own reflection hover dimly in front of him, grandiose and resentful and insecure.
The problem isn’t just that trying to undermine Trump by branding him with this or that condition turns madness into the worst kind of weapon, that it ends up stigmatizing the people who are actually suffering from mental health problems. It really does, and it’s a genuine problem, but that case has already been made. The more basic problem is this: How do you distinguish the man from the screen? The vectors of Trumpism are all as nebulously unhinged as he is himself. TV news is insane. The internet is insane. The office of the presidency is insane. Trump thunders screaming through a vast hall of mirrors; the world is full of his homunculi. His illness is not his own; it’s a mass social phenomenon, shuddering in the pout of every crooked car salesman, splashing from the flows of capital and media and loneliness, secreted in squelching bursts from a little nub of matter buried eternally in the human brain. He didn’t come to power in January of this year; Trump was inaugurated a hundred thousand years ago on some lost savannah burning under a pitiless, primeval summer and clouded by the long night of consciousness, when the first orangey ape-thing reached out its hands and decided it could wrench down the sun from the sky.
Trump thunders screaming through a vast hall of mirrors; the world is full of his homunculi.
Diagnosing Donald Trump is not a job for psychiatrists, who can only see madness as a deviation from some healthy norm. It might be a job for psychoanalysts. Freudians know that everyday life is marked by the exact same pathological phenomena that constitute madness and that character-traits are only secret psychoses; Lacanians know that the healthy subject is always barred from itself and speaks in words that, in the end, only ever refer back to its fundamental brokenness. Adornoians know that capitalism has turned us all into wriggling nexuses of misery, and the sick only suffer in a distorted form from the profound mutilation that turned the rest of us into conscientious citizens.
In any case, the psychiatric community has recused itself from the job: under the “Goldwater rule,” the American Psychiatric Association forbids its members from trying to diagnose public figures unless they’re actually their patients. Freud, meanwhile, himself put Moses and Hamlet on the couch to work out what was really animating them. But meanwhile, the American Psychoanalytic Association—a group of around 3,500 (presumably) charming oddball shrinks—has decided that, as “the field of psychoanalysis addresses the full spectrum of human behavior,” the rule should not apply, and Trump is fair game.
What could they find in there, buried under pulsing cheeks, deep in the foul interior of Donald Trump’s mouth? What’s really wrong with this man? How can you properly psychoanalyze Donald Trump?
To do it properly, you’d have to begin with Trump’s mother. Trump’s father was bald, and Trump himself may well be too, but he disguises it. First with those bright red caps. Trump senior, a tie-wearing businessman, would have never have been seen dead in one himself, but Trump passes by the actual father for the symbolic father, America, a bearded, lecherous, potent uncle, father-adjacent but eternal—except that America is weak, and must be made great again. Trump resurrects the infantile potency of the oral stages; he, and nobody else, has the phallus. But Trump also covers up his baldness with his own hair, combed delicately in a bright, ephemeral mane. A double effacement of the father. It resembles his mother’s hair, the hair of Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, who—look it up—wore in her later years a vast curling golden-blonde swirl on the top of her head. Trump never managed to enter the symbolic order; his whole life has been spent stuck on Mary’s tit, flowing infinitely into the universe.
Donald Trump shat, and the world came into being.
That’s the oral Trump. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Trump codes his mouth as an anus. It sucks nothing in, because he is impermeable, but splatters itself wildly across the world. Baby Trump never learned when to shit and when not to, and it’s far too late for him now. Watch, in particular, the way he talks about the size of the crowds whenever he talks. They’ll say it wasn’t very big. But it is, it’s enormous, it’s huge. He isn’t talking about his dick; he’s talking about his turds: with the grinning pride of a who’s just deposited one on the Persian rug—look what I made—and the woundedness of a who’s learned far too late that other people aren’t as proud as he is. Trump talks through his anus and people come out, millions of them, chanting and cheering in fecal happiness, as proud of him as he is of them. Trump is the king of the turd-people. He is a pre-Oedipal god. As Julia Kristeva notes, the breath by which God breathed life into Adam may well have been a fart. Donald Trump shat, and the world came into being.
But something about Trump resists the usual Freudian progression from mouth to anus to genitals. His body is too shapeless, too overflowing, a smooth space of chaotically distributed intensities, a blasphemous explosion of flesh. He shits from his everywhere. He is a Lovecraftian creature, a Deleuzian creature, saturated with anuses, crowned with a halo of dicks. And his sickness is the sickness of the world. Of course he could never properly go through castration, or identify with the father: he is every streak of poison skidding out from a burning oil well, every dust cloud that billows from the stubble of what was once the rainforest, every crazed whale that heaves itself onto the beaches to stink and rot. He is sickness itself.
The analysis is finished. Donald Trump sprawls in front of me on his chair, with his edges bloating over the sides and his chin wobbling into his chest. And peering in front of his face as he talks to me, someone else.
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Susan Stamper Brown
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Posted:Jul 18, 2017 5:20 pm
Last Updated:Jan 3, 2022 4:24 pm 2751 Views
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From an opinion piece in Townhall.........> Why They Hate Him,,,,
"Clear and simple, liberals hate Trump because he beat Hillary Clinton. Period. End of story. They are so overcome by anger and hatred, they fail to realize that until recently, Trump could have been their candidate."
"I say “until recently” because Trump is transitioning…transforming…changing. Prayer works, and Trump’s blanketed…covered with it."
"Another huge factor in this evolution is that with each fake news report or violent riot or piece of leaked information – Trump is becoming less like a liberal and more like Ronald Reagan. Who Trump was during the primaries is not who he is today."
"Liberals can’t handle that this immoral man received a moral mandate to do what is right for America."
"And, by gosh, he’s doing it, despite the snotty-nosed brats who continue to throw tantrums and wet their pants every time Trump takes positive action to restore America to her former greatness."
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AN OLD FRIEND AND A LITTLE BIRD
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Posted:Jul 7, 2017 11:17 pm
Last Updated:Jan 3, 2022 5:10 pm 2545 Views
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So there I was, just scrolling through my faceb**k, when a notice popped up for a friend request.....Now, I get a lot of those, but seldom respond. I used to think, sure, why not, the more the merrier, but then I found myself doing a lot of house-keeping........deleting posts that were really annoying, asking me to like and re-post to prove that I cared about abandoned puppies or whatever....you know the stuff....But sometimes there will be a welcome surprise..A long lost friend.
That's what happened today. Turns out we have a fb friend in common......So I clicked on it and up comes the face of a man who I haven't seen or heard of since he left for college. When I saw his name and face, I immediately got a huge grin on my face and a little bird flew into my heart and sat there singing. That bird told me that I had once loved this person with such a sweet love, a kind of love that I haven't felt for a long, long time, actually had not appreciated at the time.
Our friendship started in middle school, when we found ourselves next to each other a lot because we have the same surname...........Everyone thought we were cousins.....LOL.........and we played along. We spent a lot of time together over the next 6 years. ...You know what, I forgot all about him.....I'm starting to remember more.......I never considered him as boyfriend material, I don't think he thought of me that way either, though I remember him giving me gifts.....always books or music......they were always right-on........
Funny how all of a sudden I'm flooded with memories that weren't there an hour ago........Memory is fascinating, the storage and access..... Anyways, it's fun for this old heart to be visited by such an exotic memory bird.
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FELON DISENFRANCHISEMENT LAWS IN THE US
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Posted:Jul 5, 2017 10:40 pm
Last Updated:Jan 3, 2022 3:20 pm 2640 Views
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I was watching a video recently in which a reporter was asking people who they voted for and why. Most of the answers were quips and cliches, but there were these 3 young men who were really thoughtful and articulate and had some interesting points to make.2 of them said who they voted for, but the third one, who was the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable didn't say who he voted for, so the reporter asked him again and he sort of tripped over a word, swallowed and said with a catch in his throat, that he can't vote because he;s a felon.........Whoa!.. I never came across this before......I thought about this and did some research.........6 million Americans were prevented from voting in the 2016 election because of Felon Disenfranchisement laws......and most of them will never be able to vote. Think about it.....A major part of your citizenship is revoked.......A young man makes a mistake....and loses his right to participate in the selection of his leaders,in deciding what laws will determine his 's futures....
Liszt said recently that America is still the free-est country in the World. I thought that was naive considering the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, for-profit prisons and the strictest felon disenfranchisement laws..One fifth of the African American population is disenfranchised...........Free-est country in the world?
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