From Pine View Farm

QOTD 0

P. D. James:

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

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Recommended Viewing 0

If you have Netflix, check out the Murdaugh Murders.

It’s an excellent and moving documentary. There is no narrator; it’s told through the voices of those who were there compiled from interviews and live footage.

It’s also timely. The verdict just came down.

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And Now for a Musical Interlude 0

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Vaccine Nation, Boebert Is the New Gohmert Dept. 0

Also, Farron makes an excellent point about the “lab leak” theory that has been bruited about for the past week or so.

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Foxy Shady, Reprise 0

Froma Harrop argues that the most distressing thing about Fox News’s willingness to abet Donald Trump’s big lie is that it’s all about the Benjamins.

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Indoctrination Nation, Reprise 0

Image:  Man in Pilgrim garb sitting atop a triceratops.  Caption:  Great Moments in GOP Revisionist History:  December 21, 1620.  The Pilgrims arrive on the completely unoccupied continent of North America and begin teaching the dinosaurs about the dangers of critical race theory.

Click for the original image.

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The Seditionist Caucus 0

Thom argues that racism is and has long been a misdirection play.

And methinks he argues his point well.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Yet another random act of politeness:

According to New Orleans police, the child was with his father and an “acquaintance” outside a home in the 40 block of Westpark Court when the acquaintance’s gun accidentally discharged wounding the child.

(snip)

Police say the 3-year-old suffered a graze gunshot wound.

Who could have predicted that “responsible gun ownership” would lead to something like this happening over and over again almost every day?

(Well, pretty much anyone who wasn’t blinded by his or her fetish for portable phalluses . . . .)

(Slightly edited for clarity.)

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Foxy Shady 0

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Gene Collier dissects the double-talk.

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QOTD 0

C. Wright Mills:

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.

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“DeSantis World” 0

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Republican Family Values . . . 0

. . . are a most malleable thing.

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One Coin, Two Sides? 0

In a thoughtful article which I saw at The Roanoke Times, Richard Kyte muses on the implications of ChatGPT and its clones. Suffice to say, he has a few questions.

A snippet:

Consider the stated aim of the company that developed ChatGPT: “OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)–by when we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform human at most economically valuable work–benefits all of humanity.”

Imagine all the things that implies, all the ways in which human beings put words and images together. And then imagine that much of that is done by some kind of entity that has no self-awareness, no personhood, but is capable of precisely imitating the full range of expressive activites that, up to this point in world’s existence, have been the exclusvie province of human being.

While on the topic, methinks this article from Psychology Today Blogs on deepfakes (in this case, deepfake porn) is also relevant. AI and deepfakes seems to me two sides of the same coin.

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The Graham Cracker Has a Notion of Immigrants 0

Republicans play the race card because it’s the only card they have left. Otherwise, they got nothing other than their fealty to the robber barons of our New Gilded Age.

The Republican Party of my youth–the party that could include persons of integrity, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Everett Dirksen–no longer exists.

Richard Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy is all that remains of it.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Yet another oxymoronic “responsible gun owner” shows his politeness to a friend.

Meanwhile, in a sane universe . . . .

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The Misdirection Playbook 0

Title:  How To Get People To Vote for You Even after You Show Complete Disregard for Their Lives.  Frame One, captioned

Click to view the original image.

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Dis Coarse Discourse 0

Woman looking a television which displays a channel titled,

Click to view the original image.

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It’s All about the Algorithm 0

At Psychology Today Blogs, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry charges you with being addicted to your phone.

Yes, you (but certainly not me–well at least to the extent that I avoid “social” media like the anti-social plague that it has become). They further argue that this is no accident:

Your phone is designed to be addictive. Multibillion-dollar corporations have used all its features to play your brain like the instrument it is and give you little shots of dopamine all day long like a rat in an experiment being dosed with sugar, food pellets, or cocaine. The more attention you give it, the more money they make, so they made it work like drugs work, and if you are at all susceptible you are down the rabbit hole just as surely as you would be if you were addicted to cocaine, with tolerance, withdrawal, and ongoing use despite it causing problems with work or relationships, an inability to cut down, and so much time devoted to its use that the rest of your life begins to be organized around it.

Follow the link for some recommendations on how you can get your life back.

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QOTD 0

Jane Wyman:

The opportunity for brotherhood presents itself every time you meet a human being.

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A Pence-sive Moment 0

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From Pine View Farm
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