From Pine View Farm

March, 2015 archive

Make TWUUG Your LUG 0

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Learn how to use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.

It’s not hard; it’s just different.

Tidewater Unix Users Group

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, April 2.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

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Oil Boom 0

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An Upsidedown Cake 2

Writing about Indiana’s recent decision to give legislative sanction to sanctimonious bigots, Emily Mills wonders what would happen if the cake were turned upside down (emphasis added).

It’s not just LGBTQ people who will be affected. The language is general enough that really anyone could decide to violate the Civil Rights Act and claim that it’s all part of exercising one’s religious “freedom.”

That’s the biggest problem with laws like this one. The people who write them do so with an intensely myopic view of the scope, one focused almost solely on their own personal pet peeves, instead of seeing the way it could be applied right back at them. Say a gay couple owns a bakery, and decides they don’t want to serve the Republican couple that comes in to have a wedding cake made. The proprietors could claim that serving Republicans violates their own religious beliefs. Turnabout is fair play. Except when it’s not.

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Smackdown! 0

Chauncey Devega wins the belt.

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Metamorphosis 0

The right-wing has changed “freedom from discrimination” into “freedom to discriminate.” Quite clever, really, in all its vileness.

Via Raw Story.

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Everybody Must Get Fracked 0

In Williston, North Dakota, the fracking “boom” has bust (as anyone other than the local Babbits knew it would).

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Politeness is essential to rearing our young effectively.

A nine year old girl who was shot in the throat Saturday has been upgraded to stable condition. The child was transported to The University of South Alabama Medical Center earlier today by Life-Flight.

The shooting occurred on Riverbend Road Saturday afternoon and is still being investigated at this time as a tragic accident.

The story does not indicate whether the child was practicing politeness on her own or in the company of others.

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Flagging Interest 0

This news item shall certainly incite rabid wingnuttery:

The U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal Monday by high school students in Morgan Hill who were barred from wearing American flags on their T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo, a year after an angry confrontation between flag-waving Anglo and Mexican American students.

Never mind that the U. S. Flag Code forbids wearing the U. S. Flag (see the complete Flag Code at the link–those who stridently claim to revere the flag and the republic for which it stands might do well to read and abide by it):

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free.

I reckon that, in Wingnut World, disrespect is the highest form of respect.

Or something.

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QOTD 0

Mike Royko:

It’s been my policy to view the Internet not as an ‘information highway’, but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.

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The Snaring Economy 0

Steve Hill, writing on behalf of the Eugene, Oregon, taxicab industry, gets to the kernel of the Uber scam: it has nothing to do with sharing and everything to do with facilitating gypsy cabs. Here’s the telling bit of his column.

Even the very notion of ridesharing is a misnomer. The term is used in a deceptive attempt to legitimize unlicensed providers of for-hire taxi services, differentiating them from those who are licensed, background-checked, inspected and insured, and somehow excusing them from legal requirements. It is clear to see that rides are not being “shared,” they are being provided in exchange for payment.

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Speaking of Crazy . . . 0

. . . you ain’t seen nothing yet.

What could be better than a bunch of drunk frat brothers packing heat?

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Cruzing through the Crazy 3

Aside:

As someone who lives near a golf course, I must admit that my opinion of George Soros just notched up.

Also, would Agenda 21 sound so scary if it didn’t have a name like a bad Tom Cruise movie?

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Backsies 0

Steven D, considering what right-wingers mean when they say, “I want my country back,” recalls an incident from his growing up:

As a child born in the middle of the Fifties in the South, I knew at an early age that some people were considered inferior to me. The signs were all around – literally. I remember once when I was three or four when a white woman stopped me as I approached a drinking fountain, thirsty after being dragged around on a hot summer day by my mother on one of her shopping trips to Raleigh’s downtown. The woman, politely, but sternly, took hold of my arm, and told me I couldn’t use that fountain because it was for “colored people.”

I’ve a similar story, which I’ve told before, but shall tell again.

When I was about ten, my mother, brother, and I were taking the bus to visit my grandmother in South Carolina, several years before the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During a short stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, I walked into the the wrong waiting room–the “colored” waiting room. Conversation stopped; everyone looked at me.

I have never before or since felt so out-of-place and alone.

When the right says, “I want my country back,” what it demands is the ability to inflict that same feeling–the alone-ness, the out-of-placed-ness–on everyone, anyone, just because they can.

Follow the link and read Steven D’s entire post.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

(Link fixed.)

The polite ensure that they are adjusted well.

Naggatz told authorities that he was in the parking lot on West Broadway when he attempted to adjust his holster. During the adjustment , the .40 caliber hand discharged striking Naggatz in the hand.

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It’s about Time 0

Does anyone still read Time Magazine and, if so, why?

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Still Rising Again after All the Years 0

Pap interviews Chauncey Devega and the racist debt peonage system in Ferguson, Mo. (and other places).

Via We Are Respectable Negroes.

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QOTD 0

Andrew Carnegie:

Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.

(That was then.)

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And Now for Something Completely Different 0

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She Who It That Must Not Be Named 0

Watch this Florida state official avoid using the words, “climate change,” which Governor Rick Scott absolutely positively swears on a stack of campaign contributions that he has not forbidden state officials to use.

Via Jacksonville.com, which has commentary.

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Tipping Point? 0

Josh Marshall thinks that the reaction to Indiana’s recent law permitting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is qualitatively different from what’s happened in the past and that Indiana’s bigots did not anticipate it. A snippet:

Don’t we go through this story almost every year in which some red or reddish state pushes through some anti-gay rights law? This happens every year like spring follows winter. But this time something is different. Yes, there have been boycotts before. In Indiana itself, business groups wary of bad publicity and boycotts played a role in beating back another effort to ban same sex marriages. But here you have a flood of proactive statements by different companies saying they’ll shun the state. That seems to have created something of a rush to the exits (or entrances?) with various organizations which a few years ago likely wouldn’t have touched this kind of controversy signing themselves up for the effort.

Now Gov. Pence is reduced to lamely complaining that his and the legislatures efforts have been misunderstood or distorted. “I just can’t account for the hostility that’s been directed at our state,” Pence told the Indianapolis Star. “I’ve been taken aback by the mischaracterizations from outside the state of Indiana about what is in this bill.” He can’t even manage the standard, conservatives in my state are being victimized by the axis of gays and liberals. He seems genuinely surprised.

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