From Pine View Farm

July, 2013 archive

“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Be polite to your playmates.

A 6-year-old boy was shot by his 5-year-old playmate in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., on the Fourth of July, the local Mountain News newspaper reported Thrusday.

The two boys found a loaded pistol in an unlocked closet in the older boy’s grandparents’ home . . . .

Share

A Picture Is Worth 2

Image:  Libertarians tell me that eliminating minimum wage would improve workers' pay . . . . Because nothing drives up wages like a bunch of desparate starving people competing for the same job.

Via BartCop.

Share

QOTD 0

Russell Baker:

Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

Share

Theft of Services 0

Kavips explains how the charter school scam works.

Share

A Newt Is a Small Lizard 0

The Rude One thinks someone has daddy issues (warning: extremely rude).

Share

A Picture Is Worth 0

Man: Let me get this straiight.  Your anti-poverty program is no food for the poor, no health care and no education.  Why should I vote for you?  Republican:  You won't, friend,  not unless you have ID.  Man to pregnant wife on donkey as he walks away from the inn--at Bethlehem:  C'mon, Honey.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Share

The Regent and the Magic Pills 0

They have certainly worked magic for The Regent.

Share

The Galt and the Lamers, Lord of the Flies Dept. 0

A true believer tries to bring Ayn Rand’s objectivism to life in managing Sears and Kmart, with results easily predicted by anyone who is not in the spell of Ayn Rand.

It seems to have been, indeed, a searing failure.

A nugget, from MarketWatch:

An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other—and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.

Do read the rest.

Share

Lies and Lying Liars 0

If Republicans did not have lies and hate, they would have no platform at all.

Here’s the latest.

An ad from a conservative advocacy group attacks the federal health care law by asking misleading and loaded questions about its impact. The ad features a mother named Julie, who asks, “If we can’t pick our own doctor, how do I know my family’s going to get the care they need?” The law doesn’t prohibit Julie from picking her own doctor.

(snip)

The TV spot, which Americans for Prosperity began airing in Ohio and Virginia July 9, directs viewers to the website ObamacareRiskFactors.com, which is more misleading than the ad itself. The site warns of reduced wages and hours for those who work for small employers that aren’t even subject to the law, for instance.

Share

“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Be polite on the highways.

The victim was driving his Chrysler 300 west on the Expressway about 10:30 p.m. between Montgomery Drive and Route 1 when he accidentally cut off another driver, said Cpl. Gerard McShea, of the Pennsylvania State Police barracks in Philadelphia.

The victim said he saw the car behind him speed up and then heard a loud crack, McShea said. One bullet smashed the back windshield and cracked the front windshield and appears to have just missed striking the victim.

Locally, some call it the “Surekill Depressway,” but, even for the Surekill, this is unusual.

Of course, if the victim had had a Glock in the glove compartment, this would have never happened, as it would have restored the balance of politeness.

Share

QOTD 0

Alexander Pope:

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

Share

Family Feud 0

Dick Polman tries to explain the internecine wars within the Republican Party. As First Son used to say when he was a teenager, “It’s complicated.”

Share

Enemies’ List 0

At Asia Times, Matthew Harwood wonders why law enforcement focuses on the American Muslim community when evidence shows that the danger of domestic terrorism lies elsewhere. A nugget.

The idea that American law enforcement’s mass surveillance of Muslim communities is a necessary, if unfortunate, counter-terrorism tool rests with the empirically false notion that American Muslims are more prone to political violence than other Americans.

This is simply not true.

According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), right-wing terrorists perpetrated 145 “ideologically motivated homicide incidents” between 1990 and 2010. In that same period, notes START, “al Qaeda affiliates, al Qaeda-inspired extremists, and secular Arab Nationalists committed 27 homicide incidents in the United States involving 16 perpetrators or groups of perpetrators.”

Last November, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center published a report on America’s violent far-right extremists. Its numbers were even more startling than START’s. “The consolidated dataset,” writes report author Arie Perliger, “includes information on 4,420 violent incidents that occurred between 1990 and 2012 within US borders, and which caused 670 fatalities and injured 3,053 people.” Perliger also found that the number of far-right attacks had jumped 400% in the first 11 years of the 21st century.

Don’t think it could have anything with how easy it is to single out persons who are different, now, do you?

Share

The Galt and the Lamers 0

Know them by the company they keep.

Share

Does Size Matter? 0

Apparently, it does to Republicans.

Share

A Pome–Not by Henry Gibson 0

By Katie Heim. Follow the link for the backstory:

If my vagina was a gun, you would stand for its rights,
You would ride on buses and fight all the fights.
If my vagina was a gun, you would treat it with care,
You wouldn’t spill all its secrets because, well, why go there.
If my vagina was a gun, you’d say what it holds is private
From cold dead hands we could pry, you surely would riot.
If my vagina was a gun, its rights would all be protected,
no matter the body count or the children affected.
If my vagina was a gun, I could bypass security,
concealed carry laws would ensure I’d have impunity.
If my vagina was a gun, I wouldn’t have to beg you,
I could hunt this great land and do all the things men do.
But my vagina is not a gun, it is a mightier thing,
With a voice that rings true making lawmakers’ ears ring.
Vaginas are not delicate, they are muscular and magic,
So stop messing with mine, with legislation that’s tragic.
My vagina’s here to demand from the source,
Listen to the voices of thousands or feel their full force.

Read more »

Share

Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0

Not good.

First-time claims rose by 16,000 to 360,000 in the week ended July 6 from a revised 344,000, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington.

(snip)

The four-week moving average, a less volatile measure than the weekly figures, climbed to 351,750 last week from 345,750.

The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits rose by 24,000 to 2.98 million in the week ended June 29. The continuing claims figure does not include the number of Americans receiving extended benefits under federal programs.

One constant: Bloomberg’s “experts” maintain their track record of being the people to bet against at the track.

Share

The Marx of the Beast (Updated) 0

PoliticalProf analyzes the power of economics in Republicanism:

Think about the whole conservative assault on the very notion of payments to families for food and housing (what most people think of as welfare). The whole critique insists that such payments create cycles of dependency and thus entrap generations of persons in poverty and, well, laziness. Again, never mind that actual fact that the vast majority of people who go on benefits at some point in their lives stay on them only temporarily. Never mind that the typical recipient of benefits is a recently divorced white woman with children. Nope: it’s laziness and dependency, and programs like workfare are, we are told, needed to cut the vicious circle of welfare and dependency. (By the way, do we provide transportation to these jobs the poor are to take? No? Daycare? No.)

Follow the link to find out who left his Marx on the Republican Party.

Addendum, Later That Same Morning:

Discussion and clarification. Worth the two minutes it takes to read. A nugget:

. . . that human beings are not just economic creatures. They are social and antisocial and enculturated and alienated and self-interested and altruistic and every other contradictory impulse and condition all at the same time.

Share

Behind that Curtain 0

Share

QOTD 0

Fran Lebowitz:

All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.

Share