Heading Into Another Weekend (Without Our Heads)

Shunned for centuries, Vodou grows powerful 

   

  “I Was Tired of Paying My Therapist to Learn About Cults”

A warped concept of beauty has taken hold among young women

 

  Gen Z has lost the ability to manage basic adulthood

‘Wellness is a multibillion-dollar cult. Now I see through it’: the clean-living Instagrammer who learned to let go

For Mormon Missionaries, Some ‘Big, Big Changes’ 

   

  Whooping cough is back: please beware of homeopaths, their remedies and their advice!

‘Queen of the Con’ found in Maine ordered to be extradited to Northern Ireland

The 'Sift' strategy: A four-step method for spotting misinformation

Target to reduce number of stores carrying Pride-themed merchandise after last year's backlash

Dear Abby: My dad told me I’m the reason my parents are getting divorced 

   

  Virginia school board votes to restore Confederate names

Mitt Romney's Almost-VP Pick Busted For Supplements

Two little white pills hoping to fool the nation into feeling better about racism

Well, this couldn't be more poetic, since Mitt Romney is also the poster boy for the oh-so-patriotic endeavour of selling-worthless-vitamins-to-Americans scam:

"What must be most painful for [indicted Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and first lady Maureen McDonnell] right now is the knowledge of how completely avoidable this was. There’s nothing even approaching honor or pride in these transgressions. There’s no crime here that you can convince yourself was the right call as a statesman; you can’t even say, in some sort of Nixonian way, all I had in mind, the whole time, was the good of the people of Virginia. There’s nothing like that here, unless you think that Virginians really needed the dietary supplement Anatabloc in order to live long and prosper,…"

Oh, some do, some do but - while the McDonnells are going to prison for it - the Republican's Number One Guy is all too ready to mislead and oblige. That's what his supporters call success: 

Because, as we all know, he - like most Mormons - only attempt these scams because they care about America so very, very much,...

 

A Black Guy Lost His Job For Fingering A Crooked Cop

Why this man is still in Virginia is the only thing TMR questions about him 

Target™ target-ed their target-er for target-ing the wrong target:

"Dallas Northington spent nearly eight years working for Target in loss prevention, roaming the stores and scanning the surveillance cameras. In an episode at the Leesburg Target store in May that he said was typical, a man was allegedly captured twice on video shoplifting, and Northington responded as he said he always did: He called the Leesburg police, made a report and provided them the videos of the two incidents.

But the man in the video may have been a Fairfax County sheriff’s deputy, Northington said he soon learned. And within days, two things happened: The deputy retired from the sheriff’s office and Target fired Northington, 29, a married father of two with a third child on the way."

Because 8 years on the job and a family mean so much.

ROTFLMAO,...

White's Cognitive Dissonance (Will Thank Me One Day)

Loving our country just got easier - die.

"Reparations are not due because black people are black, but because black people have been injured."

America's best.

I'm not sure if Ta-Nehisi Coates created the term patriotism à la carte but, ever since he introduced it, it's definitely started explaining the spotty (and defensive) approach some take to loving our country - since most of our history included slavery:

  “For a lot of Americans, it has a negative connotation. It has been used by hate groups to promote their beliefs in white supremacy.”

TMR's considering being proud of online scams, too.

Efforts are made for that spotty (and violently defensive) approach. Just as efforts are made to denounce black voices, covering the same history, as civil rights "race hustlers" because, though the history is the same, only one part of it - the tale of white supremacy - must be allowed to exist.

"If we conclude that the conditions in black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?"

See, you didn't see shit because you was doing shit.

The people claiming they're not monolithic as blacks move together when, where, and how they want to,…

 

It's Time America Honors It's True History (Of Freedom)

Rather than honor Jefferson Davis, who was hailed as the “champion of a slave society” when he was chosen to lead the Confederacy in 1861, it seemed to me far more appropriate to name these Arlington roads in honor of Freedman’s Village (or for other historic events in Arlington, possibly the “Pentagon 9/11 Memorial Highway”).

Besides the inconvenient truth that Jefferson Davis was a white supremacist and a slaveholder, the man had no connection to Arlington County. He was born in Kentucky and owned a plantation in Mississippi.

Plus, there’s the troubling reason why his name was attached to some southern sections of Route 1 in the 1920s. It was because the Daughters of the Confederacy were outraged that there were plans for a Lincoln Highway in the North (honoring Abraham Lincoln). At the height of the Jim Crow era, when whites in the South were enforcing racial segregation by lynching blacks, these apologists for white supremacy were making a political statement by attaching the name of the Confederate president to these roads, including those in Arlington County that passed near predominately black neighborhoods.

Then, in 1964, as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in gaining passage of a landmark civil rights law, the Virginia legislature added Jefferson Davis’s name to a section of Route 110 that passes by the Pentagon. In other words, during the last century, the naming of these roads after Jefferson Davis represented a protest by white supremacists who were expressing their resentments over the end of slavery and the demise of segregation.

Thus, to leave Jefferson Davis’s name on these roads is an affront to African-Americans and, indeed, all Americans who are ashamed of this vile part of our history.

I Think We Might Need A New Name For This Country

The rapper Angel Haze grew up in a religious community in Michigan that she’s since described as a "cult," and the first secular music she ever heard was on the radio at age 16 in Virginia.

The Fog Of War

“Beating McAuliffe should not have been hard. Virginia Republicans decided to go one way and the New Jersey Republicans decided to go another way. It seems to be working in one state and not working in another.”

It Dawned On Me That "Race Hustlers" Runs Both Ways

"I like to write about how we [African-Americans] relate to others in the world, like Native Americans or Jews. There is a shared sense of discrimination toward Jews and towards blacks.,…

...We need to tell these stories, so it never happens again. [We're] at a place and time now, with the advent of the militia groups, hate groups, and the internet—there are states where people are afraid to enter. Hate is all around."

Confederate Flag Raised Along I-95 

In Chesterfield County

We Could Try Building A Fence Like The Berlin Wall, Too

PJMedia's Chris Queen A) has really bad taste in music but B) hasn't fully embraced the conservative concept of leaving other people the fuck alone:

As a Christian, my prayer for Billy Corgan is that his search for spirituality will lead him to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but seeing him move out of a nihilistic spiritual emptiness into an honest quest for higher truth encourages me. It’s a huge first step, and I pray it leads him to faith in Jesus.

BTW - Billy Corgan, leader of the awful band Smashing Pumpkins, is a thrice "married" NewAger, so I get the idea. But Queen sounds too much like Virginia Republican Lt. Gov. candidate (and pastor) E. W. Jackson, for my taste:

“Any time you say, ‘There is no other means of salvation but through Jesus Christ, and if you don’t know him and you don’t follow him and you don’t go through him, you are engaged in some sort of false religion,’ that’s controversial. But it’s the truth. Jesus said, ‘I am the way the truth and the life. No man comes unto the Father but by me.'”

Jackson's spoken out against meditation and for desegregation.

I don't know if that's PJMedia's cup of tea, but I can tell you this much:

If it keeps Smashing Pumpkins out of my life, I'm there,...

 

Thinning The Herd

It appears Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) and his wife, Maureen, are NewAgers who charged the public for (amongst other things) "a digestive system 'detox cleanse'" that's absolutely worthless. 

 Now we know:

They are, too,...