Amerika, zemlja velika

[ToniAdams]

uf, zvuci odlicno ime za njave :)

[WTF]

mozda si u pravu - ima indikacija; moja teorija je da ce misko da se okrene protiv kolega - you brought a half dead nigger into my van&now you're blaming it on me

 

Upravo to.  Bice tu mnogo okretanja™ i upiranja prstom jednih na druge, i to, bas zeznuto, sasvim na rasnoj liniji.  Bela ekipa (bike cops) koja je prvo ulovila FG ce da bude u fazonu "mi smo ga samo uhapsili, i malcice izbubecali ali nista ozbiljno, ubili ste ga vi sa vasom rough ride voznjom u kombiju) a crna ekipa (iz kombija i posle) ce da prica ovo gore. 

[Eraserhead]

Nisam neki ekspert ali mi na prvi pogled zvuci da vestaci ne bi trebalo da imaju velikih problema da utvrde da li je nekome slomljena kicma tokom prebijanja ili voznje kombijem.

[Weenie Pooh]

A ako je i jedno i drugo bilo u pitanju?

 

Foxovi eksperti i bivši panduri su već mudrovali kako je lik verovatno sam udarao glavom o zidove kombija pa mu je tako pukla kičma, ali optužnica srećom ignoriše takva laprdanja.

[akibono]

Eto, izrešetaše neku dvojicu terorista što su hteli da napadnu skup za 'slobodu govora'... sad kad bude svanulo jutro pa ispadne da su to zapravo dva crna alkosa bez posla što tumaraju po mraku.... valjda nisu, ali ovaj 'free speech' skup sa crtanjem mohameda - džizas :(

[akibono]

Kakva je međunarodna zvezda bila u ovom Garland centru u Dalasu kao specijalni gost i govornik, stvarno je čudo što su pojavila ova dvojca da napadnu  

 

 

[apostata]

Questions: How many American adults can't read? Statistics on adult illiteracy rates in the U.S.? What percent of U.S. adults can't read?

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Literacy

 

* Percent of U.S. adults who can’t read (below a basic level) - 14 %

 

* Number of U.S. adults who can’t read - 32,000,000

 

* Percent of prison inmates who can’t read - 70 %

 

* Percent of high school graduates who can’t read - 19 %

 

http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-cant-read/

[Krampa]

ko im je kriv. sve je pitanje izbora i slobodne volje

[Hella]

ali ovaj 'free speech' skup sa crtanjem mohameda - džizas :(

 

pa da najvažnije je da ne provociramo nasilnike 

[Gandalf]

Ocito je da su se Geller i Wilders nadali nekakvoj nasilnoj reakciji, pri cemu su se pobrinuli da prizeljkivana reakcija ne dovede do nekih posledica za njih.

 

Jos da je poginuo neko od posetilaca, to bi bilo idealno. Dobar PR.

Edited May 5, 2015 by Gandalf

[marv]

da je poginuo wilders to bi bio dobar pr za njega...ali nije uspeo u svom cilju

[Weenie Pooh]

Kako da pogine kad ga čuva bog lično, ovaploćen u vidu SWAT tima?

[Prospero]

and now something completely different
 
 
andrew bacevich napisao fantastičan review nove knjige christian-a appy-ja o ratu u vijetnamu (ko pročita do kraja razumeće zašto kačim ovde):
 
 
 
 

Did Reagan Win the Vietnam War?

American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, Christian G. Appy, Viking, 396 pages
By ANDREW J. BACEVICH • May 5, 2015

• 

LBJ and Reagan / Wikimedia Commons


Had you asked my parents to identify the events that shaped the America of their time, they would have answered in unison and without hesitation. The Great Depression and World War II, which both experienced at first hand, cast their shadow over everything that followed and never lost their salience.

Pinpointing events that shaped the America of our time is more complicated. Our era has included its fair share of ostensibly momentous episodes, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Operation Desert Storm but also including the Clinton impeachment, the Bush v. Gore election standoff, the events of 9/11, the Global War on Terrorism, and the Great Recession. One after another, they come and then go. And once gone, they shrink in significance, even if still lodged in memory. Looming large in the moment—remember when Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf was compared to George Patton and the Lewinsky scandal ranked alongside Watergate?—the passing of even a handful of years cuts them down to size. They are not so much forgotten as subsumed.

For today’s young person, the Vietnam War lies as far in the past as Teapot Dome and the Scopes “Monkey trial” did for me when as a young soldier I deployed back in 1970. In other words, we’re talking about pretty ancient stuff.

In American Reckoning, Christian Appy, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, makes a strong case that even if Vietnam qualifies as pretty ancient stuff, it still matters a great deal. This year marks the 50th anniversary of U.S. combat troops arriving in South Vietnam, along with the start of Rolling Thunder over the north. But there the war sits, like some undigested lump caught in the nation’s gullet, stubbornly refusing to be subsumed. For better or worse, we live in its dark shadow.

Appy divides his book into three parts, devoting one each to reflecting on why we fought, how we fought, and what we have become as a consequence. Although the first two parts are insightful and instructive, anyone familiar with the historiography of the war will find few real revelations. Even so, crossing this well-trodden ground makes for painful reading. Appy writes with bite, anger, and outrage. To absorb his account is to imbibe those sentiments.

 

As to why, arguments offered up by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, broadly supported by members of the political elite, that preserving South Vietnam constituted a vital U.S. national security interest—all the claptrap about domino theories and fighting in Southeast Asia to keep the Reds from invading California—have with the passage of time become simply incomprehensible.

Rising above all other egregious deceptions, at least in my mind, is the fact that American leaders knew then that the myth of monolithic communism was just that—a politically expedient figment of fevered imaginations. In reality, the Vietnamese hated the Chinese. For their part, the Chinese loathed and mistrusted the Russians. True, all three viewed the United States as an antagonist. Yet as President Nixon shrewdly if belatedly—perhaps even cynically—demonstrated, it lay within Washington’s capability to alter such perceptions. As a great power, the U.S. had options that it could exercise, given political leadership of sufficient wit and boldness. This fact retains considerable relevance in the present moment, with warmongers among us insisting that absent a recommitment of U.S. combat troops to Iraq ISIS will soon overrun all of Europe en route to creating a global Caliphate.

As to how, the more closely you examine the methods devised for prosecuting the Vietnam War—search-and-destroy combined with brutal but ineffective bombing—the more it becomes apparent that U.S. efforts were all but doomed from the outset. Having considered the range of possibilities available to them, civilian and military leaders chose the one least likely to yield success: a protracted war of attrition fought in a faraway land about which most Americans knew little and cared even less. By comparison, the Iraq War so recklessly begun and so radically mismanaged by George W. Bush and his generals almost seems a reasonable and well-conducted proposition—only by comparison, I hasten to add.

For my money, however, it’s part three of American Reckoning that breaks new ground and makes a distinctive contribution. When the Vietnam War finally ended in April 1975 with the fall of Saigon, President Ford had little interest in promoting anything remotely like a serious reckoning with the episode just then reaching its squalid and humiliating conclusion. Instead, Ford called upon Americans to undertake a “great national reconciliation,” as if all that had occurred had amounted to little more than an honest misunderstanding. “It was really a call for a national forgetting, a willful amnesia,” Appy charges.

Yet as his own account demonstrates, what ensued was not so much willful amnesia as willful misremembering. Americans didn’t forget Vietnam; instead they reimagined it.

Encouraged to avoid probing too deeply into matters likely to cause further pain and division, the great majority of the American people happily obliged. The upshot was not reconciliation but a sort of sham truce that papered over disconcerting questions about American purpose and identity that the war had raised. By converting the Vietnam War into a fraudulent parable, Americans succeeded in draining it of significance.

Misremembering, Appy writes, transformed Vietnam into a “story of American victimhood,” centered on specifically American sacrifice and suffering. The fate visited upon the people of Vietnam and neighboring countries gained little purchase in popular consciousness. While singling out a handful of designated scapegoats like Robert McNamara and William Westmoreland, Americans showed little interest in assessing the basic policy assumptions that had contributed to the debacle. Rather than viewing Vietnam as an outgrowth of systemic flaws, Americans classified the war as an inexplicable exception to an otherwise proven record of superior performance—the equivalent of a championship team having an off day. Certainly nothing that occurred in Vietnam offered reason to reexamine the capacity of the United States to lead the world. Any setback experienced there amounted to little more than an annoying pothole on the road to universal peace and freedom.

Needing heroes as well as scapegoats, this narrative of victimhood elevated American soldiers generally and POWs more specifically to a unique place of honor. Whether or not antiwar protestors actually spit on returning vets was beside the point. Some stories are deemed true not because they actually occurred but because they fill an essential need. Such was the case here.

Empathizing with those whose wartime service had gone unappreciated became a way of cleansing the landscape of complications. To designate all who served as heroes was to declare moot any further inquiry into conduct and consequences, whether individual or collective. Indeed, to make a show of praising those who served offered a sort of substitute for serving yourself. All that sufficed to demonstrate one’s credentials as a patriotic American was to stand with the troops, even if only figuratively.

The semi-sacred status acquired by the POW/MIA flag, promising “You are not forgotten,” signified something similar. Whether any POWs actually remained in Vietnam was irrelevant. The point of displaying the flag was to strike a posture.

Hollywood seized upon this sentiment with alacrity. POW movies starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris recast the entire Vietnam experience as a gallant effort to free Americans unjustly imprisoned by cruel and creepy Orientals. To liberate the captives was, in effect, to redeem the war itself.

Appy explores the significance of these films to great effect. Inferior art even by commercial standards, they brilliantly captured the mood of the moment. Over the past century, every decade has had its canonical cinematic depiction of what it means to be a pissed-off and alienated young American male. In the 1950s, for example, there was “Rebel Without a Cause,” and in the 1960s “Easy Rider.” After Vietnam, “Rambo” claimed the part. The political winds had shifted to starboard, but the basic point remained the same: you think I’m going to put up with this screwed up mess?

In a similar vein, Appy examines the fighter jock extravaganza “Top Gun,” which he identifies as perhaps the most important Vietnam War movie ever made, despite the nominal fact that it has next to nothing to do with Vietnam. Without question, the saga of Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell—the un-Rambo—qualifies as one of the most enduring cultural artifacts of the Age of Reagan. It may be the perfect Reagan movie.

President Reagan’s singular political insight was this: he grasped—and fully endorsed—the unwillingness of Americans to acknowledge historical limits, much less anything as definitive as outright failure. That Vietnam was inarguably a defeat signifying unexpectedly confining limits—a great power unable to beat a bunch of peasants—was something that they and he refused to countenance. 

So Reagan told Americans they didn’t have to. Declaring Vietnam a “noble cause” while insisting that if things hadn’t come out quite right it was because the troops weren’t allowed to win, he promised his countrymen a limitless future. “Top Gun” offered an action-hero depiction of what that meant—not the moral ambiguity of real life but good guys making short work of bad guys with triumphal music swelling over the closing credits.

Thanks to Reagan, it is always “Morning in America”—a claim to which each of his successors in turn has subscribed as a precondition for being elected president. That claim will echo far and wide as we enter the coming election cycle: you can bank on it.

So ironically, rather than calling into question the concept of American Exceptionalism, Vietnam became a vehicle for reaffirming it. “No more Vietnams” does not connote a determination to steer clear of unwinnable and unnecessary wars. Rather it signifies a collective resolve to avoid serious engagement with the past—to remember selectively, as befits the needs of a nation requiring constant reassurance that it is indeed indispensable.

 

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations emeritus at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies.

 

[Eraserhead]

Questions: How many American adults can't read? Statistics on adult illiteracy rates in the U.S.? What percent of U.S. adults can't read?

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Literacy

 

* Percent of U.S. adults who can’t read (below a basic level) - 14 %

 

* Number of U.S. adults who can’t read - 32,000,000

 

* Percent of prison inmates who can’t read - 70 %

 

* Percent of high school graduates who can’t read - 19 %

 

http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-cant-read/

 

 

Ovo istrazivanje nije bazicna pismenost po kojoj je nepismenost u USA na nivou od 1% sto je uobicajeno za sve razvijene zemlje.

Ovo istrazivanje meri "pismenost" kao kompleksniju stvar. Mislim da je ovo istrazivanje znatno vaznije i ukazuje na manjkavosti regularnog istrazivanja o pismenosti jer sta je vredno sto neko zna da cita ako nema sposobnost da koristi tekst upotrebljavajuci kompleksnije operacije.

 

The U.S. Dеpartment of Education, Institute of Education Sciences has conducted large scale assessment of adult proficiency in 1992 and 2003 using a common methodology from which trends could be measured. The study measures Prose, Document, and Quantitative skills and 19,000 subjects participated in the 2003 survey. There was no significant change in Prose or Document skills and a slight increase in Quantitative attributes. As in 2008, roughly 15% of the sample could function at the highest levels in all three categories. Roughly 50% were at either basic or below basic levels of proficiency in all three categories.^[2] The study identifies a class of adults who, although not meeting criteria for functional illiteracy, face reduced job opportunities and life prospects due to inadequate literacy levels relative to the requirements of contemporary society.

The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information." Further, this study showed that 41% to 44% of U.S. adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale (literacy rate of 35 or below) were living in poverty.^[2]

A follow-up study by the same group of researchers using a smaller database (19,714 interviewees) was released in 2006 that showed some upward movement of low end (basic and below to intermediate) in U.S. adult literacy levels and a decline in the full proficiency group.^[3]

Thus, if this bottom quantile of the study is equated with the functionally illiterate, and these are then removed from those classified as literate, then the resultant literacy rate for the United States would be at most 65-85% depending on where in the basic, minimal competence quantile one sets the cutoff.

The 15% figure for full literacy, equivalent to a university undergraduate level, is consistent with the notion that the "average" American reads at a 7th or 8th grade level which is also consistent with recommendations, guidelines, and norms of readability for medication directions, product information, and popular fiction.

 

[Krampa]

lepo za vidjeti da postoje osobe koje gledaju u konstrukciju statistike a ne da uzimaju rezultate iste kao slepu argumentaciju