From Pine View Farm

April, 2015 archive

Patriot Gamers 0

Via Kos.

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Trickle On Economics 0

A Moment of Clarity:  Plutocrat looking out window of corner office says to other plutocrat:  I hear their wages are stagnating.  Poor devils will never be able to afford our products.  Second plutocrat:  Wait!  What?

Via the Bob and Chez Show Blog.

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The Killing Fields in Blue 0

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It Is To Gag 0

The premise behind Ag-Gag bills is this: If no one talks about it, it didn’t happen.

It’s like the approach to teen-aged pregnancy back in the olden days when I was a young ‘un. “Nice” teen-aged girls didn’t ever get pregnant–they just disappeared from the school never to be spoken of again.

In the past few years, the meat, egg, and dairy industries have collaborated with their allies to introduce ag-gag bills in more than a dozen other states. While these bills sometimes take different forms, they’re all designed to silence whistleblowers, and in one way or another, make it illegal to videotape and expose cruelty to farm animals. Fortunately, almost every bill has failed because organizations working on issues of free speech, food safety, animal welfare, worker protection and the environment, in unison with caring lawmakers and voters, have joined together to stop these harmful measures.

It’s the Food Lion whistleblower case all over again once more redundantly.

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Assertion Is Not Evidence, TPP Dept. 0

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The Voter Fraud Fraud 0

Daniel Ruth, in discussing the larger question of Florida’s considering on-line voter registration, sums up the rationale for Republican gut-out-the-vote efforts.

Here’s the troubling thing about elections. When you offer the body politic the chance to cast a ballot, there is always the inherent risk people will also avail themselves of the opportunity to actually take the trouble to vote. And let’s face it, you can take this democracy drivel only so far.

(snip)

Scott is not a governor particularly enamored of the vagaries of elections. After all, one might lose. Why make it easier for folks to decide how they want to be governed?

Do read the rest. Ruth’s wordsmithing is marvelous.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Be polite in the wild.

Police say Christopher Montoya was showing off his gun during a camping trip earlier this month when it accidentally discharged, hitting his (13-year-old–ed.) brother in the stomach. The boy was airlifted to UNM Hospital in Albuquerque.Detectives say Montoya admitted to having drank six or seven beers that night.

“Guns and booze,” the hallmark of the good guy with a gun.

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School for Scandal 0

Noz senses the presence of “fatigue fatigue.”

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QOTD 0

Mamie van Doren:

It is possible that blondes also prefer gentlemen.

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Bathing Buddies 0

NC Dept. of Natural Resources in bath tuv along with Duke Energy's Reddy Kilowatt:  This water seems contaminated, but I can't figure out why.
Click for a larger image.

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Susie Sampson Samples Citizens 0

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Causation 0

John Cole.

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How Stuff Works: The Prison Industrial Complex 0

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Don’t skip politeness.

Curtis Johnson was close to graduating, but he died when the gun went off in the 4600 block of Chelwood Drive in Southeast Memphis.

Social media posts say it was senior skip day. The high school senior was shot during school hours.

According to police, witnesses identified 19-year-old Kendrick Patterson as the shooter.

MPD says that after arresting Patterson, he confessed to playing with a handgun and shooting Johnson.

Aside:

When did “senior skip day” become a thing?

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Football uber Alles 0

Sportswriter extraordinaire Bob Molinaro cuts to the quick:

The just-released NFL schedule reveals that the Eagles play three of their first four on the road, in part to avoid a conflict with Pope Francis, who will be saying an outdoor mass on Sunday, Sept. 27, in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For one day, at least, one major religion has elected not to compete against another.

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Droning On 0

Will Bunch sums it up.

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“One of My Best Friends Is Black” 0

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you can’t make this stuff up.

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QOTD 0

Adam Smith:

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.

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Reinstall 0

Yesterday, I noticed that the root partition of my Dell 1545n laptop was 97% full. This was not good. I was close to reaching the point that stuff would not work because the partition was full.

When I installed Slackware on that machine, I established three partitions: root, home, and swap. I gave root 20 GB, but, over the several years since I first put Slackware on this box, I’ve installed lots of stuff, and space was running out. Root needed more space.

I first tried resizing the partitions with GParted, but that failed; it seems the root was on a primary partition and /home (where everything else lived) was on an extended partition. I first set that configuration up so long ago that I don’t remember making those choices, but I must have.

Since resizing was not an option, I knew I had to reformat and reinstall. Consequently, I rsync’d my home partition to my Zareason file server to back up everything in /home, including all my configuration and data files.

I repartitioned and installed Slackware 14.1 (the box started with Slackware 13.37), giving root one-third more disk space (30 GB rather than 20 GB), then updated it to Slackware –Current.

Six hours later, everything important was reinstalled, reconfigured, and working, including my mutt email configuration, and all the dust-bunnies from four or so years of usage had been cleared out. Much of today was spent making this happen.

My first adventure with Linux was installing Slackware 10.0 ten years ago. I’m now running Slackware Current on two boxes (and Mageia and Mint on other machines), because Slackware is the distro of iron: it always works and never breaks. (Ten or fifteen years ago, who would have imagined having more than one computer in the house?)

Ten years ago, I had no idea what I was doing, but I somehow managed to self-host my website on a Slackware box in my guest room. It took me from April to August in 2005 to bring it live. Now I can muddle through a reinstall and restore in less than a day.

I think I’ve learned something, and I’ve sure had a lot of fun along the way.

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Rand Gestures 0

Macho, macho man.

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