Student groups at the University of Mississippi in Oxford will rally Friday afternoon in order to bring attention to a cause they believe is worthy of national attention the removal of the state flag from the campus.
Mississippi is the only state in the Union that still has the Confederate battle flag as part of the official state flag. Georgia was the second to last state to rid its state flag of Confederate iconography and did so in 2003.
At 12:30 CST on Friday, numerous progressive student groups and those associate with minority including the campus chapter of the NAACP will be rallying in front of a well-known Confederate Statue in the Circle, a historical central location on campus.
The organizations, which include the Black Student Union, UM Pride Network, College Democrats and others want the Associated Student Body, the student government of Ole Miss to pass a resolution that would call for the removal of the state flag from campus.
Allen Coon is a student senator and also the president of the campus College Democrats chapter. He authored the resolution and has helped organize the event.
As a native Mississippian, the fight is a personal one for Coon.
“I love my state and I care about it deeply. But every-time, I see that flag it reminds me that we are promoting a perspective that led to a war of injustice and pain,” Coon said in a phone interview with Rise News. “And that’s not representative of my Mississippi and that’s why it has to change.”
According to the Daily Mississippian, there are 49 student senators in the Associated Student Body. That would mean that at least 25 of them would have to vote in favor of taking down the flag in order for the resolution to pass. Coon told Rise News that it would be a difficult fight to win the vote in the student senate.
“If this resolution fails, then it will bring a lot more scrutiny on the campus from a national perspective,” Coon said. “The very test of a symbol is that it should be divisive. On that basis alone, it is grounds enough to take down the flag.”
“When people think of Ole Miss I don’t want them to think, ‘oh that’s a racist school,’” Buka Okoye, the president of the Ole Miss NAACP said in an interview with Daily Mississippian reporter Dawn Boddie. “Therefore, what are we doing to rid ourselves of that image?”
According to the Mississippi Business Journal, five other public universities in the state do not currently fly the official state flag: Delta State University, Mississippi State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi Valley State University and Alcorn State University.
Even if student government passes the resolution, it will be up to campus administrators to make the final decision.
Rise News is looking for a few Ole Miss students to report for us during the rally on Friday afternoon. If you are interested then please email [email protected] with a phone number and we will get back to very quickly.
Read: Proposed Ole Miss student government resolution to take down state flag on campus
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Mike Huckabee Thinks This Adele Video Makes Him Cool. He’s Really Really Wrong.
Presented without comment, because I literally don’t know of any words to describe this thing.
But just know that it is a real thing that was actually produced by a real presidential campaign.
Cover Photo Credit: Mike Huckabee For President/ Youtube (Screengrab)
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Man Who Asked To See Star Wars Film Early Has Died At 32
Daniel Fleetwood, the terminally ill man who asked to see the upcoming film “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” early has died at the age of 32.
Fleetwood’s wife Ashley made the announcement on Facebook:
“Daniel put up an amazing fight to the very end. He is now one with God and with the force. He passed in his sleep and in peace. He will always be my idol and my hero. Please hug uncle Marc for me and give Lucy lots of kisses. Rest in peace my love. This was the last selfie we ever took together.”
Photo Credit: Ashley Fleetwood/ Facebook
Fleetwood, a major Star Wars fan since childhood according to Entertainment Weekly, “had been diagnosed with spindle cell sarcoma, a connective tissue cancer, and did not expect to live until The Force Awakens’ Dec. 18 release date.”
After a few news articles were published about Fleetwood, a social media campaign under the banner of #ForceForDaniel went viral and eventually reached director JJ Abrams who allowed for Fleetwood to see an unfinished cut of the film.
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Cover Photo Credit: Ashley Fleetwood/ Facebook
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Scientists May Have Found Evidence Of An Alternate Universe. Seriously
Scientists claim that they may have just found evidence of the existence of an alternate universe.
The discovery was made while mapping the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the left over light from the early universe.
Ranga-Ram Chary, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency’s Planck Space Telescope data center at Caltech, discovered while studying the CMB that certain light spots were glowing 4,500 times brighter than expected, as reported by Russia Today (RT).
According the International Business Times, Chary has said that while there is a 30% chance the fluctuations are nothing unusual, there is also the possibility they provide evidence of a collision of our Universe with an alternate Universe.
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This sort of collision should be possible, according to modern cosmological theories that suggest the universe we see is just one bubble among many, according to New Scientist.
“Our universe may simply be a region within an eternally inflating super-region,” Chary wrote in a recent study. “Many other regions beyond our observable universe would exist with each such region governed by a different set of physical parameters.”
The multiverse theory has been based on the widely accepted idea of cosmic inflation, which suggests that the early universe expanded exponentially in an instant following the explosion of the Big Bang. Theoretically the inflation would continue until multiple universes are ultimately created.
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Although the initial findings have proved promising, verification of the anomalies as evidence of an alternate universe could prove to be difficult.
Chary himself noted that, “Unusual claims like evidence for alternate universes require a very high burden of proof.”
Further analysis of the data collected will be required in order to prove or disprove Chary’s potential discovery.
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