Christian
Did you know there was a Hutterite Youtube channel?
Meanwhile, some local people who don't know what fascism is but have heard that it's a bad thing that just-noticeably-less-ignorant people associate with the President have chosen, at least, a positive anti-fascist statement to make, with no input from "Antifa." They are building "Giving Boxes" where people can leave non-perishable grocery store items, food or non-food, that have or have not been classified as ineligible for purchase with SNAP cards.
It's a lovely idea but, if planning to use these boxes to help handout-dependent friends get the sugary junkfood they like, you may want to make sure they know when to pick up those items. This morning's other news story was that, for the fourth time in three years or some such ridiculous thing, a candy store in Gatlinburg--where tourists are thrilled by the chance to see free-range black bears--was vandalized by a bear. Sugary junkfood also attracts raccoons, rodents, and ants. And a lot of it melts in warm weather.
Probably a better idea would be to use "Giving Boxes" to offer people the sort of things they see in grocery stores but never have been able to buy with food stamps: soap, toilet paper, paper towels, personal hygiene products, laundry detergent, cleaning products, giftcards, batteries, cables, basic office/school supplies, matches, light bulbs/tubes, magazines, paperback books, dishes and cooking utensils, sewing kits, motor oil, umbrellas, hot-air fans, postage stamps, postcards, infant care supplies...
English
These rules were taught at my school, but evidently they weren't covered at a lot of schools...
Shared at the Meow. Lens, which has become quite annoying now that some clever little boy insists on showing off his plagiarism-bot's efforts to tell you what you've shown it, says this appeared as a PDF on a site called "Pooh" owned by Cindy Claire Avila. The link to "Pooh" didn't show me this PDF but did show some other printables apparently intended for schools and homeschools to use. If you want to see CCA's current offering of "numbers animals," click:
Homicidal Motorists
In Minneapolis a protester sitting at a car that was pointed right at a federal agent yelled "Drive!" The agent was armed, and shot the protester.
Sad.
Probably not what either of them intended.
The agent probably thought, as most people standing in front of motor vehicles think, that human beings don't aim cars at other human beings and start the engines.
The protester probably thought that the agent would instinctively leap out of the way when the car moved.
Unfortunately for the protester, when some people (and rats) are cornered, they fight. Instead of leaping, the agent fired...
And while the protester undoubtedly is missed and some news media want to scream on and on about that, the position of this web site is: Thus be it ever to homicidal motorists. Drive irresponsibly and die!
If you want to prevent recurrences of this unfortunate event, I'd support putting sensors on motor vehicles that activate emergency brakes whenever the vehicles are within a hundred yards of any warm-blooded lifeform, even if it's inside another car. If Renee Good's car hadn't moved, the agent wouldn't have shot her.
Reportedly his legal defense fund has already been set up on GoFundMe and filled by one rich sponsor. I must admit I'm glad. I think the way Trump has chosen to deploy ICE looks very very bad, for the department and for Trump, and can't possibly be the best way to handle the situation...but, in the very bad and messy and icky situation that existed, I think the young man did the right thing. If anything, he was too forbearing. He shot only the horrorcow who was yelling "Drive, baby, drive." He lost the opportunity to shoot the one who was actually driving.
Introvert Things
If we weren't an oppressed class, I'd think this kind of story was sweet and charming, too...
But I really think there's more of a need to affirm all the times when we saw a stranger, or a casual acquaintance, maybe someone we might have met twenty years ago or maybe that was someone else?, anyway, saw them about to turn into the same aisle at the grocery store, so we moved on to the next aisle in order to maintain a healthy distance, and they shared our preference not to waste time on idle chatter and went their way leaving us alone, and that connection through mutual respect made the trip to the store so much better...
Psychology
According to one of those old stories Freud and Jung found so illuminating, once upon a time, there was a little extrovert who was sent out to watch the sheep of the village. Growing bored, he cried "Wolf! Wolf!" and all the adults rushed out to help him fight the predator. There was no wolf. The adults scolded him and went back to work. About a week later the wretched extrovert grew bored again, and again he cried "Wolf! Wolf!" Again the adults rushed out to help. To the scolding they added spanking, and the extrovert, feeling his bruises and noting that no bones seemed to be broken yet, realized it was dangerous to cry "Wolf!" when he wanted attention. Nevertheless, winter came on, and one day a real wolf approached the flock. The boy cried "Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! There really is a wolf! Help! Please! Wolf!" The adults, who had agreed that they had done all that spanking could do for him, grimly ignored his cries. The sheep scattered. And the wolf decided to attack the creature that seemed to be making the most noise and least speed...and that is why so few extroverts survived in more primitive environments throughout the ages. Anyway, the moral was that if people receive false messages, they stop listening.
Not only has this been found true of people; it's been documented in herd animals. Animals can give false alarms just for attention, or to start games, or because they were genuinely alarmed by something that wasn't dangerous. Chicken Little may really have thought the sky was falling down. Chickens are easily scared. But then the other animals learn from the experience of the animal's giving a false alarm that that member of the flock is not a reliable source of information. The next time the panicky chicken or the mischievous crow squawks, the others look at it and carry on with what they're doing.
I see too many members of the Party of the Burro doing this these days. They emote. They caaaare so much about a situation. It's so hopeless because the President or their Congressman doesn't agree with their idea of the solution. What happens if you feel empathy for these distraught Ds and propose a solution that might work, although it does not involve State or federal government? They're furious! They don't really care about the people in the story they're telling--they only want their party in power! Nothing else can relieve their distress! How dare you suggest any other possibility! How dare you imagine that their emotions were normal human emotions rather than political game-playing!
[Google traces the photo to Instagram and shows that dozens of people have used the same picture with different captions.]
And so I notice myself reacting to the Little Boy Who Cried "Wolf!" effect. That D activist was out demonstrating. Demonstrating what? Stupidity, apparently. When someone has a lethal weapon and is obviously ready to use it, but is not attacking you, and you have a lethal weapon too but you are not a murderer, you try to de-escalate the situation. Nobody needs to kill anybody, you say. If you attack, and the person does not kill you first, then you are a murderer. Renee Good was a homicidal, suicidal fool and deserved what she got.
A case might be made, by rational nonviolent people, that the melodrama of sending armed ICE men out to "round up" would-be immigrants violently is excessive, likely to cause more violence than, say, simply offering them the amount of money that would be paid to an agent, in cash, as a bonus for voluntarily going home. To that I'd still be sympathetic. I think cash bonuses need to be longer tried and better publicized. I think even giving somebody like Ilhan Omar bonuses for each fellow Somali she repatriates would be better style than having armed men bully and hustle these people.
But oh, woe, wail, boohoohoohooooo, somebody somewhere misses Renee Good! they wail. Cry me a river, Democratic Socialists of America. Some people miss Charlie Kirk. Some people miss Doug La Malfa (R-CA), who died last week. Some people still miss little Iryna Zarutska. I still miss my mother, who deliberately pursued first pneumonia and then a stroke after learning that her glyphosate reactions were worsening, becoming chronic, because they'd finally developed into liver cancer. I find myself giving neither flip nor hoot about Renee Good. And maybe if youall had at least shown some respect for the losses of people who are missed more than that idiot ever will be, maybe the Internet would show less of a probably unhealthy, but genuine, rejoicing that Renee the Motor Terrorist is gone. One less car...!
The Democratic Party as a whole need to note the lack of empathy for their trumped-up, fakey, hokey grief about Renee Good as an indicator that they've used hyped-up emotion too many times in the past decade, that people who feel normal adult-type empathy are starting to feel cynical and even oppositional when Ds start emoting, and stop trying to manipulate our real emotions with their faked ones.
RIP
Scott Adams, who really will be missed...I'm glad this morning's post was delayed because I was watching his last podcast and taking the last Simultaneous Sip. Glad I tell you. Some writers wouldn't even bother to post on the day an e-friend died. I'm glad the end came while he was still feeling the "highs" from hospice-type medication, too.
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