From Pine View Farm

December, 2019 archive

Back to the Future 0

Werner Herzog’s Bear imagines George Bailey’s Bedford Falls three quarters of a century later.

It ain’t purty, folks.

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A Take on the on-the-Take 0

Thom and a caller wonder why Donald Trump’s public correction in plain view is being ignored.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Make politeness fashionable again.

Police say the man was shopping at Victoria’s Secret and went to put his wallet in his back pocket when a pistol discharged, striking him in the lower leg around 3:00 p.m. Police say the firearm is registered to the man, who also has a concealed carry permit. He suffered nonlife threatening injuries.

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QOTD 0

Patrice Lumumba:

A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue.

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Republican Family Values 0

Moses descending from Mt. Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments saying,

Click for the original image.

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The To-Do List 0

Donald Trump's Daily Planner, containing the following items:

Click for the original image.

(Broken link fixed.)

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Still Rising Again after All These Years 0

Rolling back the clock to 1953.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Be polite to your neighbors.

“An adult male had a shotgun and thought he removed all the rounds,” (Police Officer–ed.) Hackworth said. “The ammunition was double-aught buck. There was still one loaded. The shot went through the front and screen door, and it hit a neighbor across the street, who was taking the trash out.”

Aside:

One more time, “negligent” and “accidental” are not synonyms.

Also, if you can’t tell whether a double-aught buck shotgun shell is still chambered, it’s time for you to pack it in.

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The Christmas Police 0

As my mother would say, the nerve of some people.

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A Sellers’ Market 0

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Republican Family Values 0

Two ICE enforcers looking at baby in cage.  One says to the other,

Via Juanita Jean.

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QOTD 0

Henry Miller:

It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world – it’s the American way of looking at things.

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And Now for a Musical Interlude 0

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All the News that Fits, Facebook Frolics Dept. 0

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Unbalanced Balance 0

In a fascinating column, David Leonhardt explores his reaction to another writer’s article about “centrist bias.” I commend it to your attention.

Here’s a bit (emphasis added):

Centrist bias, as I see it, confuses the idea of centrism (which is very much an ideology) with objectivity and fairness. It’s an understandable confusion, because American politics is dominated by the two major parties, one on the left and one on the right. And the overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets — national magazines, newspapers, public radio, the non-Fox television networks — really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly.

In doing so, however, they often make an honest mistake: They equate balance with the midpoint between the two parties’ ideologies. . . .

But that’s not the only problem. There’s also the possibility that both political parties have been wrong about something and that the solution, rather than being roughly halfway between their answers, is different from what either has been proposing.

Methinks Leonhardt is onto something here.

The type of blind loyalty to centrism as he describes it does not admit the possibility that either (or both) polar position(s) may be just wrong, wrong, wrong and limits discourse to the narrow swath of landscape visible through the Overton Window.

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Consistency 0

Frame One:  Headline says,

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The Propagation 0

The Des Moines Register’s marvelous Reka Basu looks at the effects of three years of Trumpery. A snippet:

The day after Trump was elected in 2016, as a high school teacher in Keota wrote to the Register in a letter, he heard a student bellow “Trump! Trump!” in a Hispanic student’s face, saying she should go back to where she came from and was probably illegal.

At high school sports events, fans have used the chants to intimidate opposing teams’ nonwhite players. In 2017 after a high school girls’ basketball varsity game between Mediapolis and Columbus Junction (which has a large Latino population), a message saying “Go back to the border” and “Go Trump” was scribbled on a whiteboard in a locker room.

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The Rule of Lawless 0

Secretary Scofflaw.

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Close Encounters 0

In The Seattle Times, Elisabeth Becker Topkara recalls her grandmother’s warning her that antisemitism would not go away during her granddaughter’s lifetime. She offers proof that her grandmother was correct.

Before this Hanukkah, my grandmother’s dire prediction came true again, this time shaking our own family. On an otherwise ordinary day, my 11-year-old nephew Riley rode the bus home from school in his Wisconsin town. An older boy approached him. “What’s the difference between a Boy Scout and a Jew?” the child asked Riley. He answered his own riddle: “A Boy Scout comes back from the camps.”

Follow the link for the rest.

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QOTD 0

Jerome K. Jerome:

Foolish people — when I say “foolish people” in this contemptuous way I mean people who entertain different opinions to mine. If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do.

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