From Pine View Farm

June, 2012 archive

Getting the Most out of Your iJunk 0

Don’t worry about translating. Just watch.

H/T Susan for the link.

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QOTD 0

Roger Ebert, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn’t.

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Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0

Job prospects for process servers are looking up:

Despite reports of a thawing housing market, yet another wave of foreclosures appears to be looming, real estate records filed in multiple metro-Denver counties indicate.

The recording of deed-of-trust assignments in Colorado–the ownership rights of mortgages and the ability to foreclose on them–has more than doubled in the first five months of the year compared with the same period last year, The Denver Post has found.

Non Sequitur

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Responsible Fiscals 0

Banker to homeowner amongst rubble of economy:  This is all your fault.  You bought a house you couldn't afford.

Via Contradict Me.

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Driving while Brown 0

Excerpt:

The President’s not supposed to do anything in an election year, yet alone the right thing.

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The “One-Drop” Rule 0

Hearsay, the local NPR affiliate’s own news and analysis show, takes a look at the history of racial categories. If you don’t know this stuff, you should; it illuminates today’s events. From the website:

A key subset of both individual and collective identity is one of racial and ethnic identification. These constructs, for Americans in particular, are continuously growing more complex and difficult to frame. On today’s HearSay, Cathy Lewis will speak with a local scholar who’s examining the complex interplay of cultural and racial identities in our modern society.

Follow the link to listen.

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Facebook Frolics, De Agony of Defriend 1

At Psychology Today, Susan Krauss Whitbourne considers the unfriended:

Psychology is beginning to discover the uses of Facebook for research on relationships as in studies of friendship networks. However, Facebook’s unique properties as a platform for relationships make it a phenomenon worth of study in its own right. In the case of unfriending, this is particularly true. Unfriending is perhaps the ultimate in passive-aggressive forms of rejection that doesn’t have a counterpart in the “real” world of relationships. On Facebook, no one tells you that you’re unfriended; they just uncheck you as a friend. They never have to tell you in person or even explain why, nor do they need your consent to do so.

It goes on (and on) with the comfortable assumption that Facebook somehow matters more than ice cream.

I can almost imagine things like this being written about MySpace seven years ago, as least about the teen set who were so enthralled by blinking lights and flashing icons.

I know persons whose world seems to be limited to Facebook; if you aren’t using Facebook, you barely exist for them. Trying to get their attention outside of the Facebook bubble is–er–quite an effort.

I suggest that, rather than investigating the horrible trauma of the unfriended, the writer research the irony of the Facebook bubble–how a server farm so big can create individual worlds so small.

Lord, please give me more important things to worry about than being “unfriended” by a Facebook “friend.”

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Everybody Must Get Fracked 0

Facing South reports on a veteran of fracking:

Calvin Tillman was elected mayor of Dish, Texas — a community of about 200 residents 25 miles north of Fort Worth — in 2007, at a time when fracking was booming in the area. Dish sits atop the Barnett Shale, which is one of the largest natural gas fields in the United States. Ten massive pipelines run through the town, carrying about a billion cubic feet of gas per day.

Tillman spent much of his time in office fighting to regulate the gas companies, which transformed his once-quiet community into a noisy, polluted industrial center. He finally moved away last year after his two young sons began waking in the middle of the night with severe nosebleeds that the family believes were related to toxic air emissions from the drilling operations.

Before Tillman left, he offered to rent his home to a gas company executive so they could see what it was like to live in the industry’s midst.

“None took me up on it,” he says.

Read the rest.

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The First 100 Minutes 0

At Philly dot com, Daniel Deagler envisions the first day of Mitt the Flip’s administration.

A snippet:

Aide: OK, cabinet appointments. For secretary of energy, you want to nominate — um, is this right? — Exxon?

Romney: That’s exactly right. Who knows more about America’s energy needs than its largest oil company?

Aide: Sir, traditionally, a person holds that job. Exxon is a corporation.

Romney: Corporations are people, my friend. And this administration will not tolerate discrimination against people just because they happen to be corporations.

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QOTD 0

Adam Smith, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

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In Which Wall Street Meets Sherwood Forest 1

The corrupt moneychangers feared the wilds of Sherwood Forest and the men in tights of Lincoln Green.

As JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon showed up to Congress on Tuesday to try to explain how his “too big to fail” bank could mysteriously lose $2bn in risky trades, he was suddenly diverted to a back entrance. Why?

Because Robin Hood was waiting.

Nurses, healthcare and community activists were in the hallways ready to send him and the rest of his Wall Street gang a message: it’s time to pay up for the damage you have done to our communities and our nation.

This week, the Robin Hood campaign, which has exploded across the world, took a major step forward in the US with a stepped-up campaign that included visits by Robin Hood and his merry men and women to JP Morgan branches across the country, and scores of other actions.

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Taxing Concepts 0

Four Republican presidents who wanted to raise taxes compared with President Obama

Via PoliticalProf.

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The Orwellian Logic of the Surveillance State 0

From the “If I Told You I’d Have To Kill You” Dept.

In a letter (PDF) recently sent to Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Inspector General explains that he cannot provide an estimate of how many Americans the agency has spied on, because doing so would “would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”

Nonestly, you can’t make this stuff up.

More fancy footwork at the link.

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Mitt the Flip’s Bad Carma 3

Afterthought;

It occurs to me that Mitt the Flip has made so much of his money flipping companies into bankruptcy that he thinks it’s a good thing.

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The Fee Hand of the Market 0

Free-market capitalism, indeed. The editors of Bloomberg explain how the banksters parlay bad judgment and reckless bets into places at the public trough.

To be precise, JPMorgan receives a government subsidy worth about $14 billion a year, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund and our own analysis of bank balance sheets. The money helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses. More important, it distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening to destroy the euro and sink the global economy.

Remember, when you hear talk of “bail-outs” of Greece and Spain and wherever, who’s actually being bailed-out: banks who placed bets in made loans to Greece and Spain and wherever. Greece and Spain and wherever get to wave at the money as it goes by.

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Microsoft Phones It In. 0

Microsoft unveiled its tablet yesterday.

I predict that it will be almost as successful as the Windows phone.

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QOTD 0

Gordon W. Allport :

So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.

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Diagramming Sentences 0

Remember diagramming sentences?

I don’t know if that’s taught any more, but, as English is a language of word order, it damned well should be.

Bob Cesca gives a simple example.

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The Fee Hand of the Market 0

Tom Tomorrow:  The Fee Hand defends capitalism

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Now I Understand “Why Golf?” 0

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