From Pine View Farm

Still Rising Again after All These Years 0

Among other things, Thom and former FBI agent Mike German discuss the origins of the Second Amendment. It’s likely not what you expect it to be and certainly not what the NRA and its dupes, symps, and fellow travelers would want you to think.

Frankly (I do everything frankly), it rather took me aback, but it did not surprise me.

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Facebook Frolics 0

Shorter Mark Zuckerberg: Facts schmacks.

Here’s a bit from the CNN report:

“Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the new policy Tuesday. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”

Zuckerberg, however, acknowledged a “tradeoff” in the new policy, noting more harmful content will appear on the platform as a result of the content moderation changes.

Methinks “politically biased” in the passage above is Zuckerspeak for “keep calling out right-wing lies,” but that’s just me.

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Future?
Tense
0

Red-hatted man sits on a devastated landscape.  Next to him, newspaper headline read,

Click for the original image.

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The Day of Love 0

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Yet another oxymoronic “responsible gun owner.”

Yet another child.

Investigators discovered that the child appeared to have shot himself accidentally in the head, getting access to the gun inside of the car.

The boy is said to be in critical condition.

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Vaccine Nation 0

At the Des Moines Register, Kimberly Witt remembers her mother’s struggles with polio when she was still a child, before the vaccine existed. She fears that Donald Trump and RFK Jr. will bring those days back.

Here’s tiny piece from her article:

It was 1952, a month before my mom was scheduled to start kindergarten. She was excited to attend her neighborhood country school and planned to walk the half-mile with her friends. But one morning she couldn’t walk down the stairs.

“I was at the top of the stairs crying, and my parents had to carry me down,” my mom recalls. They took her to the doctor where she was diagnosed with paralytic polio.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Competent to draft a legal filing? You must be high on your own supply.

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QOTD 0

Hugh Kingsmill:

Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but success transmutes them into virtues.

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Four Years Later . . . . 0

Steve M. looks back at how the right tried to muddy muddied the waters about what actually happened on January 6, 2021.

It’s not pretty.

And, along those lines, PoliticalProf notes an irony.

Afterthought:

As my old professor of the early federal period was fond of saying, “History is irony.”

This is a particularly bitter one.

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Broadcasters of Blather on the Disinformation Superhighway 0

Cathrine V. Jansson-Boyd, writing at Psychology Today Blogs, asks a (rhetorical) question (emphasis on the original):

Admittedly I am not an avid Facebook user. But, on the few occasions I have dipped into some articles posted by a connection, I have been left wondering: Why on Earth did they repost this?

Follow the link for her thoughts on the answer, and, remember, “social” media isn’t.

Afterthought:

Yeah, I know that they don’t call it “Psychology Today Blogs” anymore, but I continue to use the term to distinguish individuals’ blog posts from the magazine’s articles.

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“History Does Not Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”* 0

Michael in Norfolk hears a rhyme from the other side of the world.

___________________-

*Mark Twain.

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Fly the Fiendly Skies 0

They get fiendlier every day.

I’m so old that I can remember when traveling on airlines was actually pleasurable. My first flight umpty-ump years ago was like a few hours in paradise.

Then, some years later, when I was hopping on airplanes every month or so on behalf of my employer, airline travel had became something to be endured (natch, this after it had been deregulated, not that there’s any cause-and-effect there). I learned to induce the relaxation response to numb myself to the experience.

And the downward spiral just seems to be continuing.

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A Notion of Immigrants 0

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Influencer idiocy.

So many guns. So much stupid.

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Republican Family Values 0

it would appear that mean for the sake of mean is a Republican Family Value.

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QOTD 0

Guy de Maupassant:

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.

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And Now for a Musical Interlude 0

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The Fifth Columnists 0

Title:  Meet the (Partial) Cast of

Click to view the original image.

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A Notion of Immigrants 0

Farron runs the numbers that show that the invasion of illegal immigrants wasn’t.

It was a talking based on a lie.

It’s a simple formula. Hate sells.

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“Democracy Dies in Darkness” . . . 0

. . . was is the motto of The Washington Post.

Now you can meet the darkness.

Welcome to this New Gilded Age.

Via Juanita Jean.

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