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margothuxley · 5 years

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My thoughts today

I have had a rough morning but I got the idea of making a spaghetti with bacon, pinot grigio on it and cheese (parmesan) and it was so fucking good that I had the rest of it. I forgot to add oregano and when I did, man, it popped.

I am now sitting trying to get to digest my rather early lunch. It’s after ten am. My feet are up on a chair and I’m on the recliner that’s really a beach folded chair and my dog Max is on the chair where my feet are resting. Max loves me and I’m not sure why he does other than the fact that I rescued him from the shelter. Katya my one cat was a shelter cat and she covered me with kisses after she realized she was in a house where ppl were kind to her. She had the one room to herself to keep her from the rambunctious Duke (see picture above). Then she graduated to the rest of the house, but she likes to hide out, or, fly up to the top of the etagere and then spy on everyone. Then Paco came along and they had to “duke” it out over the top spots of perches in the house. It was fun to watch but they were quite at odds with each other, for a while. But they like to eat together, not sharing a bowl, but huddled over their bowls why the dog is also eating in his large bowl.

What was it I was wanting to talk about? Well I wanted to sit and rest, and find some refuge. I had a difficult morning getting killed again for some reason that I couldn’t really tell, other than I was in love with Colin Firth and I feel he’s in love with me. Then I guess I must have done something worse or whatever. So I had to fly off and get some refuge in a starbucks. I hadn’t any money left or so I thought. I couldn’t find my PIN for my cc so I had to find a place to see if it still worked. It didn’t. I dug up some coins as I still owed them $1.70 but that was not enough so I tried two more cc and they all declined. I was so sad. The woman at the counter said I can have tap water so I said Thanks.

The others in the team weren’t really happy to have me there. For some reason. I am not a happy and welcome person in many places. I don’t think I’m a pariah unless they hate: Catholics, Trump voters (I plead guilty but I can’t stand him now), queen in exile, saints from the past et cetera et cetera. I swear my cities of West Lafayette and Lafayette hate me and are bent to make me poor and my Dad poor. Or what I think is their idea of kicking us out of the country. Is the USA this way everywhere? Oh, yeah, I am an author I wrote several books, one of them is On Days LIke This and it’s about the Asian American experience at Yale. I went to yale for 2 years on a post doctoral fellowship. It was not really good for me there. I felt so ostracized, and made to look and sound idiotic. I had no real friends and well, it was not a great way to start life and a successful one at that. The Yale experience might be different if you came from a rich background, had a few big shots in your family, owned property, and drove a Big Shiny BMW. If you were really smart that’s icing on the cake, dear. Yeah, that’s what Hillary would tell me. I was a smart girl but I knew almost from the start that this place wasn’t for me. I was not into going off on holiday weekends sailing, or skiing. I wasn’t into group sex, nor was I someone who liked to snort or smoke or do weed.

I wish I could get a few moments of peace today and find time to work on my business. I want to be a good person and I am trying to find my way through this enforced retirement that I had to get bec my books were not selling nor was I even able to find a consultant job. I was told by this guide of mine that working for the world wasn’t great and well, how do I reconcile this with an empty or overdraft account in the bank? I am going through hell in different directions. I’m sure that I need a flak jacket. i already have a hat that’s like that.

So my only hope is to have a way to earn money that won’t get me into too much trouble. I cannot wait tables I’d suck at it - I can’t make change well, lol. Then I can’t be someone at the retail stores (I used to be one at JC Penney) bc I cannot handle ppl all of the time. I write and I write well acc to my profs at the uni. I think that my books are good. My Muse says so. I wish to ask you to buy my books and comment if you would to tell others if you enjoyed it or not.

My real name is Mary Faderan.

Bye.

#maryfaderanblog

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libertariantaoist · 7 years

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How did Donald Trump defy all the pollsters, the pundits, and the Twitterverse “experts” and take the White House? According to the Democrats, it was all a Russian plot – Kremlin-directed Twitter “bots” spread “misinformation” and “fake news,” Russian hackers stole the DNC’s emails, and this deprived Hillary Clinton of her rightful place as President of these United States. If we listen to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, it was all because their man Bernie failed to win the nomination due to corporate influence and the flawed election strategy of the Clinton campaign. And the Republicans tell us it was because – well, they don’t have any coherent theory, but, hey, they’ll take it regardless of why or how it happened.

What hasn’t emerged from the shock and horror of the elites, however, is a reasonably convincing explanation for the Trump victory: the storied “deplorables,” as Mrs. Clinton described them, rose up in rebellion against the coastal elites and delivered them a blow from which they are still reeling. Disdained, forgotten, and left behind, these rural not-college-educated near-the-poverty-line voters, who had traditionally voted Democratic, deserted the party – but why?

No real explanation has been forthcoming. Hillary tells us it was due, in part, to “sexism,” and the rest was a dark conspiracy by Vladimir Putin and James Comey. More objective observers attribute the switch to the relentless emphasis by the Democrats on identity politics, which seems convincing until one examines the actual statistics down to the county level in those key states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – that gave the party of Trump the keys to the White House.

Francis Shen, a professor of law professor at the University of Minnesota, and Douglas Kriner, who teaches political science at Boston University, have done just that, and their conclusion is stunning – and vitally important to those of us who want to understand what the current relation of political forces means for the anti-interventionist movement. They write:

“With so much post-election analysis, it is surprising that no one has pointed to the possibility that inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election. Put simply: perhaps the small slice of America that is fighting and dying for the nation’s security is tired of its political leaders ignoring this disproportionate burden. To investigate this possibility, we conducted an analysis of the 2016 Presidential election returns. In previous research, we’ve shown that communities with higher casualty rates are also communities from more rural, less wealthy, and less educated parts of the country. In both 2004 and 2006, voters in these communities became more likely to vote against politicians perceived as orchestrating the conflicts in which their friends and neighbors died.

“The data analysis presented in this working paper finds that in the 2016 election Trump spoke to this part of America. Even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump. Indeed, our results suggest that if three states key to Trump’s victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.”

While the Trump campaign’s foreign policy pronouncements often veered into bombastic belligerence – “We’re going to bomb the hell out of ISIS!” – the candidate also ventured into territory previously alien to GOP presidential nominees. He denounced the Iraq war – “They lied. There were no weapons of mass destruction and they knew there were none” – and forswore the “regime change” foreign policy that produced the bloody disasters in Libya and Syria, as well as Iraq. His “America First” theme evoked the “isolationist” sentiment that is anathema to the Washington elites – and is the default position of the average American. And yet he did not take the reflexively anti-military position so beloved by peaceniks of the left: he praised our veterans at every opportunity and railed against their neglect by a government that used and abused them.

In an election that gave Trump a razor-thin victory in three key states, this is what gave him the margin of victory.

The Shen-Kriner analysis takes us deep into the weeds, with a county-by-county survey of voter patterns that correlates casualty rates with election results, comparing the interventionist Mitt Romney’s results with Trump’s. This Romney-Trump dichotomy is vitally important in understanding what happened in the 2016 presidential election. As Shen and Kriner point out, while the casualty rate in most areas of the country is low, certain sections – rural, relatively poorer, in the heartland – bear the brunt, and these voters had been abandoning the GOP (or never even considered them) in recent years:

“[M]ore than a quarter of counties had experienced a casualty rate more than 3.5 times greater, and 10% of counties had suffered casualty rates of more than 7 deaths per 100,000 residents. Voters in such communities increasingly abandoned Republican candidates in a series of elections in the 2000s.”

Shen-Kriner go deeper than the economics-fixated analysts, who simply point to the poor rural voters who flocked to Trump’s banner, by focusing in on those areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania where casualty rates are higher, running a comparative analysis, and concluding that Trump’s anti-interventionist (albeit pro-military) pronouncements made the crucial difference and put him over the top:

“In each state, our analysis predicts that Trump would have lost between 1.4% and 1.6% of the vote if the state had suffered a lower casualty rate. As illustrated in Figure 2, such margins would have easily flipped all three states into the Democratic column.”

Trump won by a very narrow margin, triumphing in the Electoral College but losing the popular vote: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania made the difference. The Shen-Kriner analysis shows that “if there had been a lower casualty rate in each state – Trump would have lost all three.”

We’re constantly told that Americans don’t care about foreign policy, and that it’s all about “bread-and-butter” issues: a full stomach is the key to victory for the political Establishment, while economic distress is the fulcrum of insurgency. This may be true in a general sense, but in this era of sharp partisan divides and close elections it isn’t enough of an explanation for why Trump won – and why he may or may not win in 2020. As Shen and Kriner put it:

“The significant inroads that Trump made among constituencies exhausted by fifteen years of war – coupled with his razor thin electoral margin (which approached negative three million votes in the national popular tally) – should make Trump even more cautious in pursuing ground wars.

“Trump, of course, has already proven in his first 100 days that conventional wisdom (and conventional political theory) may not apply to his administration. However, Trump has plainly demonstrated keen electoral instincts and may well think twice before taking actions that risk alienating an important part of his base.”

Trump has clearly not thought twice, if at all, about the course he is taking us on abroad and its relation to his future political career. Since taking office, he has bombed Syria, allied with Saudi Arabia in bombing Yemen, implied that war with North Korea is within the realm of the possible, and gone out of his way to confront Iran. The “America First’ rhetoric of the campaign has gone by the wayside, as the combative truculence of his personal style is transferred from the domestic political scene to the international stage. A prime example of this is his reaction to an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government against rebel Islamist forces – an attack that US intelligence told him never occurred. As Seymour Hersh reported in Der Spiegel:

“Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.

“The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack, including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all US, allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

“Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. ‘None of this makes any sense,’ one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. ‘We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth … I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.’”

The intelligence was clear: the idea that Bashar al-Assad had ordered a chemical attack was a “fairy tale,” as one officer put it. Yet the media and the pundits were all over this, and Ivanka Trump was telling her father that he had to do something. Trump didn’t care about the evidence:

“The intelligence made clear that a Syrian Air Force SU-24 fighter bomber had used a conventional weapon to hit its target: There had been no chemical warhead. And yet it was impossible for the experts to persuade the president of this once he had made up his mind. ‘The president saw the photographs of poisoned little girls and said it was an Assad atrocity,’ the senior adviser said. ‘It’s typical of human nature. You jump to the conclusion you want. Intelligence analysts do not argue with a president. They’re not going to tell the president, ‘if you interpret the data this way, I quit.’”

“You jump to the conclusion you want” – that’s Donald J. Trump in a nutshell. And that is his fatal flaw: a complete indifference to facts. That and the presence of several advisors who clearly want a confrontation with Iran in Syria sealed the deal: the US struck at Syria, and he even threatened to do it again when the administration claimed Assad was preparing to launch yet another chemical attack – an act of unparalleled stupidity that would likely bring the US into a war that would destroy the Syrian Ba’athist regime and end Assad’s rule.

You’ll notice that Trump keeps reiterating the night of the election: in his speeches on the stump – yes, he’s still on the stump – he lovingly recalls how the media said he didn’t have a chance, how the pollsters were dead wrong, and how he triumphed in the end. He takes us state-by-state, as the returns came in, reveling in how wrong everybody was and how he overcame seemingly impossible odds to take the prize. I think the reason for this seemingly endless reiteration is that no one was more surprised by his victory than him – and, to this day, he has no idea why he won. He’s still scratching his head, wondering how in the heck it happened: when he wakes up in the White House each morning, I’ll bet his first thought is: Where am I?

His cluelessness will prove his ultimate downfall. Surrounded by warhawks in the foreign policy realm, and reveling in the accolades his outbursts of aggression have won him in the media, he doesn’t understand the key role his anti-interventionist rhetoric played in propelling him to victory. The people around him, for the most part, have assiduously ignored – or sought to neutralize – that aspect of the 2016 campaign, and are unlikely to bring the Shen-Kriner analysis of the election to his attention. The “keen electoral instincts” those two analysts think Trump possesses are, in my view, a simplistic faith in his own charisma and a semi-mystical belief in his destiny as the savior of a country in decline. Facts, evidence, analysis, hard intelligence – none of it means a damned thing to a man who operates by instinct. And that instinct is ruled by range-of-the-moment considerations: the opinions of his daughter, the opinions of the pundits, and what he sees on television.

Personal character matters – and it is a life-and-death matter in a President. That Trump is lacking in the character department has been made all too obvious in the first months of his presidency. A commander-in-chief ruled by his “gut feelings” is a danger, in any case: in Trump’s case, it could well prove catastrophic.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, while Trump himself is proving to be a huge disappointment to those anti-interventionists – such as myself – who took his rhetoric at face value, Trump’s supporters are a different matter entirely. That’s because they, too, took his “America First” no-regime-change pronouncements seriously, and many of them voted for him on that basis – enough, as Shen and Kriner show, to put him in the White House. As the Democratic party and its left-wing hangers-on rail against Russia and embrace a neoconservative foreign policy, Trump’s core supporters, the America Firsters, are the future of the anti-interventionist movement.

I’m currently rereading Rose Wilder Lane’s novel of pioneer life, Free Land, and a recurrent theme expressed by the hard-pressed characters is “There’s no loss without some gain.” Plagued by blizzards, swarms of locusts, horse thieves, and worse, the men and women who settled the West were a sturdy bunch, not easily discouraged by adversity. We anti-interventionists, if we are to win our battle, must emulate their example, and seek our best advantage even in the face of reversals and betrayal.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com

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wendyimmiller · 5 years

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The Inspiration of a Guiding Star: Jardim da Estrela

My mind was made up 43 years ago after a week filled with cheap vino tinto, emotional Fado music and lots of walking up and down steep hills in Lisbon. In a park, off the busy, beaten path, I found an inspiration for a horticultural career. The Jardim da Estrela was my guiding star. I professed solemn vows in 1976: I would love parks and gardens forever.

Before I arrived in Portugal I had traveled on the cheap across the United Kingdom, Holland, France and Spain. Dog-eared pages of Arthur Frommer’s travel guide led me to abundant parks and gardens.

On my visit to Portugal, as a 24-year-old, I was unsure what would happen after I plowed through my travel budget. I was a college graduate with a sociology degree and no certain career path. I had spent happy months beforehand, working the end of a spade at the great Hillenmeyer Nurseries in Lexington, Kentucky. Digging soil paid a little and was more satisfying than trying to make sense of Émile Durkeim.

A round trip plane ticket and a Eurail Pass would be the best investments of my life.

Lisbon’s Jardim da Estrela (Star Garden) was not mentioned in Frommer’s.

Fifteen years ago, I gave my travel journal from that year, with no redactions, to my traveler-daughter.

I borrowed the journal back last month and enjoyed rereading my account. During three months of traveling in the late fall of 1975 and winter of 1976, mostly by myself, there were moments of joy, wasted nights and confessional passages of lonely days, but nothing that required absolution.

Kapok blooms

1976 was a crucial period in Portugal. The 1974 Carnation Revolution marked the beginning of a messy political and economic transition from a dictatorship to a Democracy. During this time, Angolans were granted independence, and an estimated 250,000 Portuguese fled Angola and returned home.

The chaos in Portugal scared off tourists, but it didn’t scare me. I was naive and lucky. The Portuguese were gracious to this skinny, bearded wanderer.

I arrived in Lisbon in February 1976. I left the train station and started climbing up the hill. My backpack felt like I was dragging a tractor tire. A street merchant took pity. He put me on a bus to a boarding house in the Estrela neighborhood. It was bedbug-free, comfortable and cheap. The rooms slept four or five. My roommates were neither grifters nor adrift. They were searchers for something exciting that wasn’t yet clear. So was I.

Pokeberry-like fruit of bela sombra, Phytolacca dioica

Creepy, crawly roots of bela sombra

The Basilica da Estrela was the centerpiece of the neighborhood. The Jardim da Estrela, the size of a city block, was the neutral ground. Everyone was welcome. The park was humble, nowhere close to London’s Hyde Park or Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, but bold enough to call itself a garden. I found a comfortable home away from home in Lisbon. People-watching was an interest of mine. I spent hours here each day for four or five days.

It had been the dead of winter on my first visit, and I had barely begun scratching the surface of plants and gardens.

I had a different vantage on my second visit. My career as a nurseryman and seedsman was in the rearview mirror now.

I returned to the Jardim da Estrela late last month. I had a lovely reunion, though my three hours there seemed a little surreal.

It was early autumn.

I had 43 years of catching up to do in only a few hours.

A teenager with green-dyed hair walked purposefully through the park, while old men and women, who came by their gray hair naturally, poked along leaning on canes, past a table of men shuffling dominoes at the outdoor cafe.

Picnickers and sunbathers staked out the grass.

Bodybuilders pumped it up.

Halfway across the park, children watched a puppet show while two kids, in a play area nearby, learned how to walk on stilts. A few paces away was an open-air, free public library.

A scout group of girls and boys with backpacks and whittled walking sticks marched through the park in loose formation, past the statue of a gardener, wielding a hoe that looked heavy enough to chop sugar cane.

The sculpted gardener’s real-life successors knew how to take care of the Jardim da Estrela. The plantings were neatly tended. There was little trash, and the only vandals were easy to identify. They’d carved their names on thick curved, spiny leaves of giant agaves. Mona and Stefi were here. So were Jenean, Stella, Vesma, Andre, Amark, Leo and Silvia.

The thorny kapok tree, of rainforests, was in bloom. (Frost is rare in Lisbon.) I caught a distinct whiff of marijuana but couldn’t detect the malodorous smell of the pink blooms of Ceiba peltandra. They were too high in the tree for me to reach. The fallen blooms had no scent.

Ginkgoes, palms, philodendrons and southern magnolias mingled with one another. A bird perched high in a 100’ tall Norfolk Island pine looked down on a crooked cylindrical cactus and pockets of blue plumbago and the South African lion’s ear, Leonotis leonurus.

African lion’s ear, Leonotis leonurus

I was happy to see a ground cover of evergreen rhodeas. I grow the sacred lily in the shade of a saucer magnolia at home in Salvisa. I wish some clever breeder would come up with a cultivar that has a fruit stalk with bright red mature berries growing above the foliage, instead of the winterberries staying hidden in the thicket of dark green, strap-shaped leaves. Wouldn’t a yellow-berried form of Rhodea japonica be nice?

I could not identify a fascinating, shade tree with a trunk that looked like it had suffered a melt down. I was told it was bela sombra (nice shadow). The hanging clusters of green berries, high in the tree, looked familiar, but I would never have guessed Phytolacca dioica, a woody South American relative of our native pokeberry. I posted a photo of the immature berries, to try to stump the chumps on the Facebook page Plant Idents. It took 15 minutes before someone got it right.

A newly married couple crossed the street from the Basilica de Estrela to have their wedding photos taken in the park. Their hopes and dreams were consummated for the family album under the big banyan tree.

Organizers for the Partido Inciciativa Liberal were busy, 50 feet away, setting up a rally for Portuguese parliamentary election. Cold beer was waiting in coolers for thirsty, prospective voters. “Cool Operator” played on a loudspeaker in the background.

An earnest, young woman stopped by to invite me to a guided mediation group. She said it might improve my body, heart and soul.

I was tempted by the suggestion but needed at the moment to tend to my sweet tooth.

Chocolate gelato worked wonders.

So did the Jardim da Estrela.

I smiled and thanked the nice woman for the gelato.

“Obrigardo!”

She smiled back and said, “Thank you for coming to the park today.”

The Inspiration of a Guiding Star: Jardim da Estrela originally appeared on GardenRant on October 9, 2019.

from Gardening https://www.gardenrant.com/2019/10/the-inspiration-of-a-guiding-star-jardim-da-estrela.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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turfandlawncare · 5 years

Text

The Inspiration of a Guiding Star: Jardim da Estrela

Before I arrived in Portugal I had traveled on the cheap across the United Kingdom, Holland, France and Spain. Dog-eared pages of Arthur Frommer’s travel guide led me to abundant parks and gardens.

A round trip plane ticket and a Eurail Pass would be the best investments of my life.

Lisbon’s Jardim da Estrela (Star Garden) was not mentioned in Frommer’s.

Fifteen years ago, I gave my travel journal from that year, with no redactions, to my traveler-daughter.

Kapok blooms

The chaos in Portugal scared off tourists, but it didn’t scare me. I was naive and lucky. The Portuguese were gracious to this skinny, bearded wanderer.

Pokeberry-like fruit of bela sombra, Phytolacca dioica

Creepy, crawly roots of bela sombra

It had been the dead of winter on my first visit, and I had barely begun scratching the surface of plants and gardens.

I had a different vantage on my second visit. My career as a nurseryman and seedsman was in the rearview mirror now.

I returned to the Jardim da Estrela late last month. I had a lovely reunion, though my three hours there seemed a little surreal.

It was early autumn.

I had 43 years of catching up to do in only a few hours.

Picnickers and sunbathers staked out the grass.

Bodybuilders pumped it up.

Halfway across the park, children watched a puppet show while two kids, in a play area nearby, learned how to walk on stilts. A few paces away was an open-air, free public library.

African lion’s ear, Leonotis leonurus

An earnest, young woman stopped by to invite me to a guided mediation group. She said it might improve my body, heart and soul.

I was tempted by the suggestion but needed at the moment to tend to my sweet tooth.

Chocolate gelato worked wonders.

So did the Jardim da Estrela.

I smiled and thanked the nice woman for the gelato.

“Obrigardo!”

She smiled back and said, “Thank you for coming to the park today.”

The Inspiration of a Guiding Star: Jardim da Estrela originally appeared on GardenRant on October 9, 2019.

from GardenRant https://ift.tt/2ntSEKU

#GardenRant

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dangkynhanhieusanphamcom · 5 years

Text

What Happens When Girl Power Goes Wrong?

THE LIAR By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

The literary thriller can be reminiscent of the political candidate who tries to be all things to all voters, oscillating between radically disparate positions and never fully satisfying the target demographic of either pole. This is how I felt while reading “The Liar.” For the most part, the Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen writes sensitively of inner turmoil and loneliness, but she intermittently sabotages her own work with a made-for-Netflix plot ricochet or line of cheesy dialogue.

The novel starts as Nofar, a friendless, plain-Jane 17-year-old is berated in the ice-cream parlor where she works by an entitled C-list celebrity singer. She flees to the bathroom, he lays a hand on her, and she screams. In the chaotic aftermath, she allows others to believe that he sexually assaulted her. But Lavi, an equally lonely boy who lives upstairs, intuits that she’s lying and sexually blackmails her. Nofar’s guilt gnaws at her even as she is hailed as an avatar of feminist empowerment; the singer is disgraced and imprisoned.

Through an omniscient point of view, Gundar-Goshen handles her characters’ interior lives gracefully, especially in a section about an octogenarian impersonating her dead friend as she concocts Holocaust testimonials for live audiences. The prose (translated by Sondra Silverston) can be evocative; Nofar’s first kiss with Lavi is a “lively fish, wet and fluttering, in her mouth, sailing along her gums, its fins brushing against her teeth.” She’s also adept at family dynamics — enough so that I found myself wishing she had focused merely on relationships and hadn’t deployed a slew of contrivances (or else that she had written an unapologetic thriller that dispensed with any claims to plausibility).

As it turns out, a homeless man pretending to be both deaf and mute has somehow witnessed the incident in the ice-cream parlor. He later shouts, “It didn’t happen!” — and the detective in charge of the case coincidentally overhears him. Nofar’s confession is found in her diary, then clumsily covered up. There’s a foot chase and the theft of a piece of ostensible evidence. Scenes related to the investigation and Nofar’s celebrity unspool formulaically. It doesn’t help that the characters sometimes think of TV shows as behavioral guides.

The dialogue can be tin-eared. The rant that upsets Nofar is out of a 1930s gangster film: “You pie-faced moron! You stupid cow! You should tweeze your eyebrows before going out in public. And those pimples, didn’t anyone ever tell you not to squeeze them? You just need a few olives on your face and they can sell it as pizza.” This goes on for four more lines. Even less realistic are the teenagers’ slang and conduct. “If that’s what attempted suicide looks like, then I’m steamed broccoli,” Lavi says. When the bros at school don’t believe he has a girlfriend, they demand proof via a selfie with Nofar, a request treated as a monumental dare.

Though the novel centers on an alleged sexual assault, the crisis is used primarily as a pretext to meditate upon lying rather than on its post-#MeToo ramifications. Lavi’s blackmailing is its own egregious abuse of power, yet Nofar falls for him — and the sexual favors he obtains are prudish, as if the author was reluctant to sever our empathy for a seeming underdog. In Nofar’s second-guessing of herself, she doesn’t consider that confessing would delegitimize the credibility of other assault victims. Aside from the fact that female victims now have a (somewhat) stronger voice, “The Liar” seems as if it takes place decades ago, and the crime could almost as easily have been something else.

Still, the writing here has enough psychological depth and lovely passages to sustain its misfires. And the ending, which suggests redemption for both the singer and Nofar, is surprisingly moving. I’ll watch the Netflix adaptation the day it streams.

The post What Happens When Girl Power Goes Wrong? appeared first on NEWS - EVENTS - LEGAL.

source https://dangkynhanhieusanpham.com/what-happens-when-girl-power-goes-wrong/

#dangkynhanhieusanpham

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ralphmorgan-blog1 · 7 years

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Get ready for a more militant and ‘woke’ NAACP

(CNN) The NAACP has described itself as the "oldest and boldest" civil rights group in America, but it may soon tack on another word to its billing: "woke."

The slang term, used to describe an unaware person who has become socially conscious, is how one national NAACP leader described the group's recent metamorphosis. Others talked with unabashed excitement about the civil rights movement becoming "more militant" and "back to the streets."

In-your-face rhetoric is not usually associated with the venerable NAACP. The 108-year-old organization has been like the Cadillac of civil rights groups -- its name still has cachet, but people prefer newer models of activism. It's been overshadowed by Black Lives Matter and accused of being obsolete.

But something changed when a local NAACP official recently found a way to catapult the group back into the national spotlight. He issued a travel advisory for the state of Missouri, urging "extreme CAUTION" for any person of color traveling there. The advisory evoked the Green Book, a pamphlet that guided black motorists across the treacherous terrain of Jim Crow's America. Reporters started asking if Missouri is the new Mississippi. And NAACP leaders seemed delighted.

Learn more about the storied history of the Green Book

"We were built for this moment," says John Gaskin, a spokesman for the group's St. Louis branch. "Cadillacs are built for the highways."

Yet the story behind the story -- why the NAACP came up with the advisory and what it says about a potentially seismic shift in the group's philosophy -- is as interesting as the advisory itself.

Over the top or on the mark?

Start with a basic question: Is the advisory really necessary, or is it a bit over the top?

Consider the history. This is the first time the NAACP has issued a travel advisory.

It was founded during a period of widespread lynching in the United States and didn't issue one then.

It didn't issue one after four black girls were killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

It didn't issue one when Medgar Evers, one of its most prominent leaders, was shot to death in front of his Mississippi home that same year.

It didn't issue one when riots erupted across America after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. five years later.

Why now?

Nimrod "Rod" Chapel Jr., president of the NAACP's Missouri State Conference, says he decided to issue the advisory after the state's Legislature passed a law in June making it more difficult to sue for housing or job discrimination. The full NAACP subsequently adopted his advisory at its national convention.

Chapel says the Missouri law "is worse than Jim Crow in some ways." As justification for the advisory, he also cited a report that said black motorists are 75% more likely to be stopped by officers in Missouri than white drivers.

"I don't think we could have responsibly done anything less," Chapel says. "We have a society in Missouri that has turned its back on morality. You cannot legalize discrimination and harassment, and they've done that by giving immunity to people who do it."

Then there's Missouri's peculiar history. It's where race riots erupted in 2014 in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson after a white police officer shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, to death.

None of that, though, is enough to merit the group's first travel advisory, one critic says.

Rick Moran, an editor with American Thinker, condemned the travel advisory in a recent column. He says it was much more dangerous driving while black in Jim Crow Mississippi than contemporary Missouri.

"The whole thing is nonsense," Moran says. "It's a fundraising gimmick. It just seems like that's something you do when you're sitting around the table and someone says, 'Gee, we're kind of low on fundraising, what can we do to goose that number?' "

Gaskin, of the St. Louis NAACP, acknowledged that the type of racism in contemporary Missouri is not as lethal as other eras in American history. He cited the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers ambushed on a rural Mississippi road, which was depicted in the movie "Mississippi Burning."

But that doesn't mean the travel advisory isn't merited, he says.

"Racism here in Missouri is hidden, and that can be the most devastating racism," Gaskin says. "We're not talking 'Mississippi Burning' racism. We're talking about the sort of racism of being pulled over and asked additional questions that you might not be asked in Illinois. Folks on your street might not be so welcoming."

The advisory may have done its job. It focused national attention on the state of Missouri and brought publicity to the NAACP, which only last month had been publicly blasted by a powerful group of black ministers for verging on irrelevance.

"The work of the NAACP is more important than ever before," Gaskin says. "If it wasn't relevant, this wouldn't be the leading story of the last couple of days. That's why this made the headlines -- because this is the NAACP."

And at least one historian who is an authority on driving while black during those "Mississippi Burning" days wasn't offended by the travel advisory.

Calvin Ramsey wrote the play "The Green Book," which traces the rise of the unofficial travel advisory that many blacks and Jews used during the Jim Crow era. He says he wasn't surprised by the NAACP's actions.

Calvin Ramsey explains how travel has changed since Jim Crow era

"I guess they'd rather be over the top than under the radar," Ramsey says. "There's a lot of raw nerves since [President Donald Trump's] election. I thought that we had passed this in a lot of ways, but I was never totally convinced that we passed this completely."

The notoriety the NAACP's advisory attracted is a sign of progress, he says.

"We didn't have a CNN before and people were out there on their own," he says. "A lot of things happened that were never reported. The Green Book was our AAA guide because we couldn't belong to AAA. It was a lifesaver."

Glimpses of a new NAACP

The travel advisory also may hint at the NAACP's new direction.

The group has gone through a rough patch. In May, it announced it would not renew the contract of its then-president, Cornell William Brooks. Its leaders called the decision part of a "transformational, systemwide refresh and strategic re-envisioning."

In June, the group held its annual national convention, where leaders talked openly about trying to remain relevant. One writer, Michael A. Fletcher of ESPN, while covering the convention said the group's traditional approach of working within legal and legislative channels for social change can now seem "ponderous or even irrelevant" because of the "raucous" demonstrations of groups like Black Lives Matter.

And just weeks before the convention, a group of black ministers released a blistering open letter demanding that the NAACP change.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church's Council of Bishops called on NAACP leaders to "restructure the organization" to avoid irrelevancy. The A.M.E. Church is a pillar in the black community and has provided many of the NAACP's best-known leaders.

"Longevity alone is not proof of relevance," the statement read. "For the reality is that today the NAACP is smaller and less influential than it has ever been in its history."

How would a new NAACP look if it answered the challenge by the A.M.E. Church?

It may look a little more like Black Livers Matter.

Traditional civil rights group have been wary and critical of Black Lives Matter activists. The movement, which gives prominent places of power to women and members of the LGBT community, is run very differently than many civil rights groups. Traditional civil rights groups evolved out of the black church, which tended to be led by autocratic men who condemned gays and lesbians and didn't see women as equals. Even today, some black churches still won't allow women to preach and few officially affirm gay and lesbians.

Some of that wariness also may be rooted in generational differences. There have often been clashes between older civil rights leaders and the young folks they condemned for moving too fast and being too aggressive. Andrew Young, a close aide to King, once apologized after calling Black Lives Matter activists "unlovable little brats."

Now, however, at least some NAACP leaders are talking about Black Lives Matter activists as potential allies, not rivals.

Chapel, the Missouri NAACP official who issued the travel advisory, says he admires Black Lives Matter.

"Some may say there goes a bunch of crazy kids," he says. "These are young folks who were concerned about their community, and they did something about it. That's called activism. In the NAACP, there's room for everybody, whether it's Black Lives Matter or other people of conscience."

Anthony Davis, national coordinator for the college and youth division of the NAACP, is a fan as well.

"I love it," he says. "As a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, the social justice and civil rights movement has been able to become more militant. It's OK to be back in the streets. We would love to partner and work with Black Lives Matter because we appreciate them for what they do."

Davis says the NAACP is already adjusting its outreach to younger people. He says it's creating more engaging platforms on social media to attract youth and touring with hip-hop stars to register voters for the 2018 midterms.

"Over the last year, we've done a good job branding ourselves as not only this historic civil rights group, but the youth and college division is more hip and, I hate to use this term, but, 'woke,' " Davis says.

Becoming more like Black Lives Matter, though, might not be good for the NAACP, one sociologist says. He says the group lacks structure and long-term vision. The Black Lives Matter movement has also been weakened by infighting.

Learn about divisions within the Black Lives Matter Movement

"The NAACP has lasted a long time for a reason," says Shayne Lee, a sociologist with the University of Houston. "There's a risk when you copy the latest flavor. You risk losing your core constituency."

The Missouri travel advisory may mark a new direction for the NAACP, but the kind of leader the group chooses next may serve as the ultimate proof of a new "woke" NAACP.

Gaskin, the St. Louis NAACP leader, sounds confident.

Some in the black community, he says, were asleep during the last eight years while Barack Obama was President. Now they're in the Trump era, and they're taking a second look at the NAACP.

"At that time, they didn't think they needed us," he says. "You don't miss water until your well dries."

The next few months and years will show if the group can not only be "bold," "old" and "woke,'' but do something else:

Adapt.