#NationalDayofPrayer
Today is the #NationalDayofPrayer. This is a repost. Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
Good Morning G-d. Please give me the slack I need to make it through this busy life. I had a birthday recently, and am getting older. Please give me less pain, both above and below the neck. Thank you for letting me get this far. Thank you for the gift of sobriety, and the memory of inebrience. The gift of moderation would have been appreciated. Help me to overcome body chemistry telling me to be unhappy. If this doesn’t work, help me hide it better.
Please tell the Jesus Worshipers to shut up. They make too much noise. Help me to forgive them. Give Jesus Worshipers a bit more humility. Help Jesus Worshipers to get over their confusion, and quit hating on gay people. Let people know that G-d does not write books. Let men know that A REAL MAN KEEPS CONTROL OF HIS TEMPER. Please tell the proud people praying today that it is better to listen than to talk, and that louder does not mean more true.
Please find a happy medium for Atlanta water. Let us have neither drought nor flood. It would help if the developers would move to North Carolina, and the politicians would grow a conscience.
G-d, please try to get along better with Allah. This is important. Maybe if you and her got along better, then all those religious crazies would hate each other less. Help white people and black people get along better. Please be good to the people who have already lived, and are now deceased. Please understand that I am not in a hurry to join them.
Help Mr. Obama with the mess this country is in. Help Israel get along with her neighbors, and live within her borders. Help the world solve the carbon dioxide problem.
Thank you for the birds that sing. Thank you for dogs, and dog owners who clean up. Thank you for earth, air, fire, and water. Thank you for the people who enjoy this prayer. Help those who are offended to get over it. Namaste, amen, all my relations, Good Bye.
PuffHo Logic
PuffHo recently had a tasteful piece of work titled 12 Powerful Responses To People Who Think The Baltimore Protests Are Unnecessary. If you want to see logical fallacies on display, this is the place to go. The header ad today features Selected Risk Information About JANUVIA.
Before we get started here, it should be noted that the residents of ghetto Baltimore have serious concerns. The Freddie Gray riot did not just happen. The same conditions of poverty, crime, drugs, and aggressive police exist in poor neighborhoods around America. People should not be surprised when this rage bubbles over into violence.
The palvering pundits of American media, both social and anti social, do not help matters with their explainations. There used to be a saying … if you can’t say anything good about someone, don’t say anything at all. This has been amended. The modern version reads if you can’t say anything good about anyone, complain about the media.
The logic party begins with an explaination. “These same people deflect the blame for poor police treatment on black communities rather than addressing the underlying systemic issues disproportionally affecting black lives. In so many words, Freddie Gray is responsible for his own death. Those troubling theories are exactly why the protests are necessary.”
The link is to “The classic Willy Wonka meme.” It shows Gene Wilder, with the words “You’re being treated poorly by police? Have you tried not breaking the law to see if that helps?” According to PuffHo, this is “exactly why the protests are necessary.” Maybe CVS should sue Willa Wonka.
There is another old saying … two wrongs do not make a right. Apparently, this too is obsolete. The fact that crowds of sports fans got out of control somehow justifies the destruction of property over police brutality. Not everyone makes the connection.
There are a few exercises in twitter logic. @MalcolmLondon *Media thoughts on Baltimore* “MLK is probably spinning in his grave right now!” Appropriate response: “…how’d he get into that grave?” chamblee54 The same way Malcolm X did.
@rachelzuckerm White privilege = getting to decide what type of violence is acceptable in our society #BaltimoreUprising
@OhNoSheTwitnt The same people who said “not all men” abuse women and “not all cops” are violent racists are saying “yes all black people” are thugs.
@tallblacknerd Sorry but im not gonna be upset over replaceable property when you don’t care about the irreplaceable lives
@_UrriYall worried about how we “look”. We are laid out in the street dead then handcuffed in cold blood. That’s how we look
Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
Esoteric
The must include word in a monday morning writing contest is PEDANTIC (adjective). This key word is rendered, as always, in all caps. Keyboard communicators have the same opinion of all caps writers that sidewalk based pedestrians have of street preachers. Even if you agree with the message, the medium is too tacky for words.
The writing contest prefers that you use third definition option of this key word. Today, the preferred usage of pedantic is UNIMAGINATIVE; PEDESTRIAN. It is again presented in all caps, with a fig leaf semi colon keeping the peace. This must be an archaic dictionary at work. Today, the unimaginative thing to do is hop in the car, and burn fossil fuels to get where you are going. The enlightened method would be to walk, or to be a pedestrian.
This post is named esoteric, in honor of pedantic’s bff word. (Spell check suggestion: antiseptic’s buff) No one ever accused esoteric of being unimaginative or pedestrian. In tenth grade, PG had a drill sergeant english teacher. One day, the class was discussing “The rocking horse winner,” by D.H. Lawrence. It is a terrible piece of work. One young lady asked the teacher why anyone would write something so esoteric. The teacher had never heard of esoteric, and was enchanted.
This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Google Searches And Black Mortality
PG was trolling twitter one day when an item caught his eye. @Flyswatter There’s a correlation where racist Google searches and high black mortality rates occur. The tweet linked to an article at HuffPo (the long winded sister of PoPo) with the disturbing title The Connection Between Racist Google Searches And Black Mortality Rates.
“A new study shows a chilling correlation between the number of racist Google searches in an area and the long-term mortality rates of the black people living there. … David Chae … an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, determined how racist a geographic area was by how frequently an epithet for African-Americans appeared in area Google searches. Internet searches are a good way of measuring societal attitudes, Chae said, because people don’t self-censor in their own homes. Areas with the most searches for the epithet “n*****” had the highest mortality rates among African-Americans, found the study, which Chae and seven coauthors published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. “
The article refers to a serious scientific study, Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality. Some people with degrees broke the country into 192 Designated Marketing Areas. In the DMA where people performed more Google searches for the “n-word,” Black people were more likely to die.
“In this study, we investigated the utility of a previously developed Internet search-based proxy of area racism as a predictor of Black mortality rates. Area racism was the proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word” in 196 designated market areas (DMAs). Negative binomial regression models were specified taking into account individual age, sex, year of death, and Census region and adjusted to the 2000 US standard population to examine the association between area racism and Black mortality rates, which were derived from death certificates and mid-year population counts collated by the National Center for Health Statistics (2004–2009) DMAs characterized by a one standard deviation greater level of area racism were associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause Black mortality rate, equivalent to over 30,000 deaths annually.”
“This previously developed variable was calculated as the proportion of total Internet search queries containing the “N-word” (singular or plural) using Google from 2004–2007. More colloquial forms of the “N-word” (i.e., ending in “-a” or “-as”) were not included given prior analysis of top searches revealing that these versions were used in different contexts compared to searches of the term ending in “-er” or “-ers” … Area racism was standardized so that a one-unit increase in area racism indicates a one standard deviation higher proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word.””
The study was inspired by a New York Times article, How Racist Are We? Ask Google. In this study, areas where people googled the “er” version of the “n-word” were less likely to vote for Barack Obama. “(I did not include searches that included the word “n**ga” because these searches were mostly for rap lyrics.)” LANGUAGE ALERT Use caution when reading this article. It uses the “n-word,” using all six letters without any euphemizing symbols.
The study claims to have been peer reviewed. It does not indicate the race of the people making google searches for the “n-word that ends in er.” This search statistic, which is not broken down on the internet, is the only measure of “racism” that is used. The mortality statistics for mixed race, and non black POC are not mentioned. Media coverage of sporting event riots was not discussed.
Pictures from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
Religion For Lack Of A Better Word
@jonathanchait Right-wing evidentiary standards on anti-Semitism are as insanely low as left-wing evidentiary standards on racism ~ Maybe we need to think about the way we deal with racism. There are some problems with your approach. ~ “It is only through fiction that facts can be made instructive or even intelligible.” — George Bernard Shaw ~ “People think that because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.” — Anthony Powell ~“I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.” — Philip Roth ~ That’s got to be the worst sentence I have ever written. Syntactically waterboarded. ~ Except for the shoving by Miss Walmart, the lady was getting the attention she was looking for. It would have been crueler if they ignored her. ~ @strangetinybird If u are trying to make peace w yrself, then u probably need to recognize where u are making war w yrself ~ Just for the sake or argument, how many of those comments were accompanied by video of moving lips? Was there creative editing? The walk was clearly a play for attention. The shoving, and liquid throwing, were not justified, but the rest of the behavior was not really that bad. The woman was trying to provoke, and apparently she got what she was looking for. ~ Why do people get so worked up about racism and gay marriage and ignore trade agreements? ~ KJ @kjmelara I want to have an open dialogue about #AmericanReflexxx Luther Mckinnon @chamblee54 @kjmelara American Reflexxx is phony you never see the moving lips of ppl making the comments KJ @kjmelara @chamblee54 who the fuck is you Luther Mckinnon @chamblee54 @kjmelara are you from Myrtle Beach? KJ @kjmelara @chamblee54 Stay out of my mentions troll. You are blocked from following @kjmelara and viewing @kjmelara’s Tweets. Learn more ~ So glad you survived an event that had nothing to do with you. You are an asshole for marking yourself safe in an earthquake that you were no where close to. Disrespectful and arrogant. ~ Every interaction I’ve had with you has shown you to be a pushy, arrogant, ignorant twat. Thanks for being consistent ~ Hopefully we can hang out in the back yard after dinner. ~ Post successfully updated. Lookin’ good! ~ please relax your binary muscle. You’ll feel better. At least I hope you will. ~ When I count the pages in my #Bible, and divide the total by two, I get one reckoning of the middle. On this page is Psalms 70. Here is a lovely verse. Psalms 70:2 Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt. ~ The Bible talk was off topic. A dance break is more spiritually edible. ~ You might enjoy these pictures. ~ Thank you. Religion, for lack of a better word, is a highly personal affair. It is not always comfortable to talk about. One of my many issues with the Jesus Worship Church is this notion that I should be required to discuss these sensitive matters with people I have not learned to trust. ~ Why am I inside on a beautiful sunday afternoon reading this? ~ God @TheTweetOfGod “I’ll pray for you” is an intellectually dishonest way of saying “Fuck off.” ~ This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs. ~ This post is interrupted by a popup ad for “the EVERYDAY SELF-LOVE COURSE Free yourself from toxic self-talk and give yourself the love you deserve!” ~ pictures from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. ~ selah
American Reflexxx
There is a video making the rounds these days. It was produced two years ago, in Myrtle Beach SC. It shows a pretty person, wearing scanty clothes, behaving in a provocative manner. The person, a cis female named Signe Pierce, , wears a mirrored visor. The crowd cannot see her face.
The drama opens with an intoxicated young man hitting on the performer. This is one of the acts that was clearly directed at the performer. In another, a young lady sneaks up from behind and pushes the performer down onto the sidewalk.
There is a lot of talk in the video. Apparently it was recorded by the Alli Coates, who followed the performer around with a video camera. People speculate about the gender of the performer, among other things. Most, though not all, of the talk is not complimentary.
This running commentary is odd. You never see a pair of moving lips to go with the comments. You don’t know when the comments were made. There is very little variety in the voices. How a moving video camera got these high quality sound recordings is a mystery.
The video is getting quite a reaction these days. The person whose facebook posting PG saw went into a purple prose phrenzy. “PLEASE WATCH THIS VIDEO. Its is the most important experimental documentary i’ve seen in years. Its a devastating & revealing portrait of society’s reaction to an unusual but confident person.People argue that someone willing to attack a stranger based on their appearance must hate themselves, and in this case they’re literally attacking a mirror on legs. I cant do this film justice with a write-up please just check it out.” This technicolor text can be found on a tumblr, Sleazeburger in Paradise.
In real life, Signe Pierce and Alli Coates are a romantic couple. They live together in LA’s Echo Park. “We fell in love in cyberspace, which is rather fitting. … The couple met on Tumblr and OkCupid. Signe found Alli’s photography on Tumblr, and a week later by coincidence (or algorithms), Alli messaged Signe on OKCupid.”
“In our home we have artwork by a few artists that work with cyberfeminist themes, such as graphic design duo Sarah Faith & Nicole Killian and photographer Elizabeth Renstrom. Pam Anderson is the centerpiece of our shrine. The female form is beautiful and should be celebrated rather than shamed, and Pam is a great representation of unapologetic, unabashed femininity. — Signe and Alli”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This institution celebrated its 215th birthday April 24. Picture #06661 was taken in Texas, at the Galveston Bathing Review, 1926.
UPDATE The following conversation was on twitter.
@kjmelara I want to have an open dialogue about #AmericanReflexxx
@chamblee54 @kjmelara http://wp.me/pca2S-beo #Americanreflexxx is phony you never see the moving lips of ppl making the comments
@kjmelara @chamblee54 who the fuck is you
@chamblee54 @kjmelara are you from Myrtle Beach?
@kjmelara @chamblee54 Stay out of my mentions troll.
You are blocked from following @kjmelara and viewing @kjmelara’s Tweets. Learn more
Caucasian
At the 20:00 mark of the latest Risk show, Kevin Allison tells a story. He used the word caucasian to describe himself. His friend, who knows about such things, said that you can’t call yourself Caucasian.
The word Caucasian is derived from the Caucasus mountains. This is a region in Asia where Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia exist, not always in harmony. The thinking goes that many different types of people live in this region. It is not accurate to describe people of European origin as Caucasian.
According to wikipedia, the three primary races of mankind are Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid. Mongoloid refers to the people of East Asian, while the Negroid people originated in sub-saharan Africa. Both Mongoloid and Negroid are considered tacky, with the latter devolving into the dreaded n-word. Maybe it is natural progress to label Caucasian as politically incorrect.
If you google the phrase “is Caucasian,” the search suggestions are a race, white, an ethnicity, racist, a culture, a color, still used. The ever trenchant Urban Dictionary says Causcasian is “A ridiculous way of saying “white person”. Used mostly by Americans.” PG finds this ironic. The first person he knew who used the c-word regularly was a Black Muslim named John Ali.
The UD has a page for something called the Caucasian Donut. “When an exceptionally large white girl finishes oral sex on another exceptionally large white boy and proceeds to collect his jizz and puts it on a pastry of her choice.” It has an ad, with the slogan Join Hillary for America.
So the c-word, in addition to being pretentious, is scientifically dubious. Most people who use it have never heard of the Caucasus mountains. But is it (cue dramatic music) Racist? This post thinks so.
“Caucasian, literally, refers to people native to the Caucasus, but it has become interchangeable with any number of ‘White’ populations, most of wh1om trace their ancestry to Europe. One gets the feeling that the term ‘White’ fell out of favor and was replaced by ‘Caucasian’ much like ‘Black’ was replaced by ‘African-American’. But the roots of such terminology are a bit disturbing; it was postulated that the natives of the Caucasus exhibited the idealized physical appearance so the Caucasus were believed to be the birthplace of mankind. The logic behind this idea — the assumption that Whites exhibit the best physical appearance — is implicitly racist. Additionally, we now know our species first appeared in Africa, so the biology isn’t any good either. The connotations of the term Caucasian along with the geographical absurdity of using that term to describe all Europeans or Whites are the two main reasons we should abandon the term.”
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
Traditional Slavic Feel
The only thing you need to know is cntr + z ~ I’m sick of this country being led on the road to communism and the liberals that are helping take it there due to their immoral beliefs and selfish attitude ~ @Brimshack Calling Hillary Clinton a psycho commie doesn’t do much to tell us about HER mental state. @WiseManPhil ~ @Brimshack If you still need your college teacher to tell you to write in complete sentences, there is something about education that you don’t get. ~ @storybandit We dare you to write a 199-word story using this opening: The lady fluttered her fan. #writingdare @chamblee54 @storybandit An alternate: The lady fluffed her fan. @storybandit @chamblee54 Afraid ppl might take that alternate in a porny direction :P ~ Does habe earphones mean speak earphones? ~ Matt Walsh is an idiot working for Glenn Beck. ~ Altars manly reinstall concurrency antecedents cruelest bracket winces ~ WordXWord celebrates diversity, the creative use of language and the experience of community – using spoken word, poetry and storytelling in celebration of the individual, to bridge differences and connect people.~ @TheKevinAllison It’s so hard to tell true stories when you know the people you talk about might hear them. ~ search engine terms for chamblee54.wordpress.com today: crazy tom petty pics, dorothy kilgallen autopsy photos, depression is my nature, mary jo kopechne ~ Yes, in the early eighties I remember reading that the QWERTY keyboard was actually designed to slow peoples’ fingers down, so the machine wouldn’t jam. And that the DVORAK keyboard was designed for the opposite effect…along with, of course, a traditional Slavic feel ~ A tempestuous prisoner is forced to implicate a noncomforist convict in the theft of classified documents ~ A monopolizing green-skinned alien and a human-plant hybrid fail to escape Earth together before an environmental collapse ~ A sea nymph who can stop time for five seconds borrows a lucky necklace from an eunuch while trying to save a powerful god ~ @pourmecoffee I have a learning disability that causes me to read “An Open Letter To…” as “Stop reading now.” ~ I vote for fabulicity. The spell check suggestion is facility. ~ I posted a graphic poem. I made some changes to a picture. I decided to be adventurous and use the BBB editor to add the updated photo. I added the photo. The BBB editor said “Update made, Lookin’ Great,” or something like that. I looked at the updated post. Instead of the 720×447 size I usually use, the new picture was 300×186. That is in pixels, which I suspect the designer of the BBB editor does not know. Anyway, I went to the hassle of opening the classic editor, and added the updated picture. It was sized 720×447, as G-d intended. I probably will not make any more efforts to post with the BBB editor. ~ Mr. Stanley is also ugly. ~ ” i know where to hide the bodies.” Is that why you grew that beard? ~ We are not checking this account right now, as we are out of the country. Thank you for your patience and understanding. ~ This Dust Was Once the Man ~ @storybandit · We dare you to write a 29-word poem using the following words: scorcher, outlawed, homeschool, outplacement. #writingdare ~ I have written about this guy before. I don’t like racism, but I don’t think this person is going to help matters any. Telling people to speak out against racism sounds good in theory, but there are a few questions to ask. ~ Do you know all the facts? What if the person telling you about a racism incident is lying? Is it racism, or a personal dispute where someone chooses to make race an issue? Is it about institutional oppression, or just someone saying something inappropriate? Will your “calling out” make the situation better? Is it any of your business? ~ Dr. Martin Luther King gave a famous speech. He had a dream that people would be judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. Fifty years later, an obese actor is screaming “see color motherfucker.” This is not progress. ~ So yeah, you don’t have to like racism to be put off my this guy’s act. What is amazing is how many people are impressed by it. ~ pictures from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. ~ selah
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