From Pine View Farm

November, 2013 archive

Count Your Blessings. Count Them One by One. 0

Via Escape from Whitemanistan.

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Friends and Family 0

Warning: Language.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Put Down that Cell Phone and Back Away. Keep Your Hands Where I Can See Them. 0

Reg Henry counsels selfie-restraint. A nugget:

Full disclosure on selfies: While I have not taken a photograph of myself on a cellphone, being sufficiently quaint to think that their main purpose is to make calls, the younger me did squeeze into those little photography booths provided in malls for boys and girls to take a strip of photos of themselves while making funny faces.

But that wasn’t about the photography or the egotism; it was about the squeezing. Not the same thing at all.

Do read the rest.

On the rare times that I see myself in a web cam, cell phone, or tablet pointed at my face, I think, “What a stupid looking pose. Don’t. Just don’t.”

And I listen to me.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

More news from the confluence of guns and stupid:

Two North Carolina parents are facing multiple charges after police said that one 3-year-old child accidentally shot another 3-year-old child near Asheboro this week.

According to WXII, deputies believe that 27-year-old William Monroe Simmons’ daughter was in a playroom unattended when the other 3-year-old shot her with a .22-caliber rifle that was left in the room.

. . . more evidence that an intelligence test should be required for owning firearms.

We had guns in the house when I grew up. They were always out of reach of children and unloaded, with the ammunition stored elsewhere, as anyone with enough smarts to own them would be sure to do.

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QOTD 0

G. B. Stern:

Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone.

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Wars and Mongers of War 2

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Tipping Point 0

Office workers with tip jars.  Manager:


Click for a larger image.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

A horse pulling an Amish buggy was killed Sunday in a drive-by shooting in Pennsylvania, police report.

Words fail me.

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“. . . the Lines on the Map Move from Side to Side” 0

Rich old men playiing chess at the Club:  Obama fails to understand that it's the job of the President to start wars, not avoid them.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

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Susie Sampson’s Sister’s Seasonal Sentiments 0

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Facebook Frolics 0

Relax.

It’s only ones and zeroes.

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His Name in Vain 0

Any fool can call himself a “Christian.”

Many fools do, even as they know not of what they speak.

It’s late. I’m tired. I’m old, and my outrage meter red-lined more years ago than I care to remember.

As my two or three regular readers know, I was raised Christian, Southern Baptist before Texans took over* and turned the Southern Baptist Convention into something I do not recognize.

This is no Christianity that I know.

I shall shut up now. I do not trust myself to still my rage.

________________

*Texas is one messed-up place.

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“The ‘Knockout’ Game” 2

I’ve had an uneasy feeling about reports of the “knockout game” since I first heard them.

They sound too much like the “wilding” hoax of a generation ago, which led to a lynch mob-like conviction of five kids for something that they did not do. I see that Will Bunch also has qualms.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been encouraging more people to buy and read the Daily News. I wish the mayor had read — or read more carefully — a really good piece that my colleague Jason Nark published yesterday, hours before both Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey went before the hot TV lights. Nark said the police in Philadelphia and around the country have no idea if the so-called “knockout game” is even real or just an urban myth, and that while there’s one — yes, one — incident in Fox Chase that Philly cops think might have fit this pattern, they were quick to add that, as Nark wrote, “the attack is just a new name for an age-old phenomenon: random violence.”

Chauncey Devega sees the stories of the “knockout game” as yet another in a long tradition of attempts to dehumanize Not White persons and dress them in menace.

I will not try to rewrite what he has expressed so well. Here’s a nugget:

(By the way, both as a trained historian and as a Southern boy who knows bigotry when he sees it, Devega is quite right–when nothing else works, or even when everything else works, bigots foment fear. Fear is their friend, their tool, their go-to weapon against good will. And now back to the nugget, already in progress . . . .)

The knockout game hysteria fits these criteria: it features long-standing white supremacist fixations on “black criminality”, is focused on young people of color, resonates with fears by white people regarding America’s changing demographics while reinforcing the White Right’s vacuous lie that white people are “victims” of “reverse racism” in the post civil rights era, and is disseminated by the Right-wing media apparatus.

Moreover, the way that the knockout game moral panic has been circulated by the news media is a very chilling echo of how race and rumor were historically used to incite white racial pogroms, spectacular lynchings, and other types of terrorism against African-Americans. Of course, there is an important distinction: the knockout game is an example of wanton street thuggery by criminals; the lynching tree and racial terrorism were rituals of mass white violence against innocent black Americans.

Follow the links–both of them. Read the rest(s).

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QOTD 0

Winston Churchill:

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

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Twits on Twitter 0

Reminder: Once the stupid is on the internet, it stays on the internet.

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Welfare Queens 0

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Black(hearted) Fridays 0

Standard_UnhappyWalmart

Click the image to learn more.

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You Ain’t Seen N-N-Nothing Yet 0

In the Las Vegas Sun, Dan Thomasson wonders just how low television can go.

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A Picture Is Worth 0

Chart showing consistently *much* lower growth of Federal spending under Democrats under Mitch McConnell quote that the growth of Federal spending must be curbed.

Via BartCop.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Be polite in Sunday service.

Churchgoers at Pinelake Church in Rankin County were preparing for service on Sunday morning when the 9mm handgun in Joseph Edgar Ray’s pocket discharged while he was sitting down, according to the Clarion-Ledger.

Flowood Police Department Lt. Ricky McMillian told the paper that the bullet lodged in the concrete floor and a woman was hit by the shell. WAPT also reported that “[f]ragments from the bullet shell grazed a woman nearby.” WJTV’s report said that the shell “barely broke skin.”

Jesus must be so proud.

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