Thursday, March 30, 2023

America 1



U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made her first video on TikTok and used the platform to defend the communist Chinese app from being banned nationwide after TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, donated six figures to a Hispanic caucus of which she is a member.

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Since Fetterman was sworn in as senator, the U.S. Senate has voted 69 times. Fetterman missed 53 of the last 64 roll-call votes, which is just under 83 percent.

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Meanwhile, in Canada...
Laurie Rubel, an associate professor of mathematics education, explains that proponents of “2 + 2 = 4” are grounded “in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values.” Although Rubel acknowledged the equation “literally” equals four, the statement is “used as a kind of basic truth & way to ridicule many critiques of mathematics as white and as western and as exclusionary.”


America 1

There is a wonderful story about America in a book called "Finding Oz" by Evan Schwartz. In October of 1869, in Cardiff, New York, a small town outside of Syracuse, a farmer named William Newell discovered a twelve-foot "petrified giant " while digging a well. He soon placed a tent around it and charged admission. He eventually sold it to a local businessman for 37,000 dollars, a huge amount at the time.

Meanwhile, archeologists examined the giant and declared it a recently created fake. Then a factory owner named George Hull admitted that he had commissioned its creation out of gypsum-just to prove how easy it was to fool Americans--and gave it to his cousin Newell to be "accidentally discovered". This apparently grew out of an argument he had with a local fundamentalist who believed that, according to Genesis, giants once roamed the earth.

Case closed, right? No. People kept coming. People kept paying to see it. P.T. Barnum offered an unbelievable 60,000 dollars for it and, when rebuffed, had his own replica built and advertised it as the real fake. ("There is a sucker born every minute" was apparently coined by the owner of the "original fake.") But Barnum's observation was more profound: "The American people love to be humbugged," he observed.

There was a local man, L. Frank Baum, a Syracuse castor-oil merchant, who watched this evolve and took it to heart. When he wrote "Wizard of Oz" and the wizard is finally revealed as a fraud, he says, "it was the only thing I could do." The people of Oz were eager to be deluded and were willing "to do anything I wished them to."

Other generalizations are yours to make.

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