I’m more American than you

Drop everything you're doing and watch this….

cc: @VictorBlackwell pic.twitter.com/N9ZWttHSzd

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) July 27, 2019

At some point, I don’t know exactly when, I decided that I would stop being upset by the news. Especially political news.

I decided to stop being upset about a lot of things.

It’s part giving up. It’s part exhaustion. It’s part for my health. It’s partly so I don’t get upset by other people’s so-called passions. It’s partly to let good enough alone.

The above clip is something that bothers me. And it should. The whole idea that there are some more patriotic than others. That there are some that are more in love with America. That some are more Christian. And some are more American. And others aren’t American, Christian, Patriotic enough … what the fuck is that?

I thought that we all were Americans with different perspectives who live together in unity.

E Pluribus Unum and shit.

But if you go to any news aggregate with a comment section, the comments are so spectacularly anti-the-other-side that any different perspective is considered a troll.

Division is this country’s middle name. It’s sad. It’s very, fucking sad.

And to have a president who promotes differences over similarities. Who refuses to share the umbrella of his views with those that do not think the same … that’s refusal to common decency.

I remember this complaint about Obama. And I guess if you squinted your eyes and tilt your head, you could assume that promoting different progressive ideas means someone feels slighted. Gosh, I would hate to have someone promote their personal agendas around me incessantly without any care for my feelings, beliefs or lack thereof.

Oh wait.

These last few months I’ve spent more time with my family in North Carolina since maybe college. I do not refuse their prayers before meals even at my own dinner table. I do not oppose them when they bring up Christian literature or movies or say they’re tired of the leftist conspiracies of evolution and other leftist ideologies. I don’t claim to be more American than they are, even though I do not remotely share their views of God, Jesus, religion, faith, or any of the 100s of billboards that I read driving between Illinois and North Carolina brazenly claiming hell is real and Jesus is real and “when you die, you WILL meet your maker.”

That Yeshua Fog is thick. It’s bold. It’s insecure. It’s constantly reminding, self assuring. It’s superfluous, but I get why it’s almost impossible to walk away from.

It’d be certainly refreshing if the conversation wasn’t so hoity toity, self righteous and dominant. The division muscle is a weird one. I wish it would atrophy and die.

 

I bet someone lost his or her job

Whoops:

An armored truck was driving in the westbound lanes near Ashford Dunwoody Road when a side door flew open, dumping its contents onto the interstate. Cash was all over the road, according to one driver who called into WSB Radio.

“I saw a bunch of paper floating around in the road and everybody pulling over on the shoulder, and as I got closer I noticed it was all just cash,” the driver reported.

PHOTOS: Weird things that have snarled Atlanta traffic

Typically, a spill on an interstate would be cause for consternation and likely stop traffic for a few hours. This time, drivers stopped willingly. Video a passerby uploaded to Reddit showed at least a half-dozen cars stopped on the shoulder as drivers grabbed at the flying bills.

NPR: After 6-Year Battle, Florida Couple Wins The Right To Plant Veggies In Front Yard

Holy shit, some people are assholes. Thank goodness these people won the legal battle to plant produce in their front yard. Jebus forbid!

Okra. Bell peppers. Cherry tomatoes. Jalapeños and squash.

Those are some of the vegetables that Hermine Ricketts and her husband, Tom Carroll, planted in front of their home in Miami Shores, Fla., on Monday.

That’s the day a Florida law went into effect that nullifies local bans on vegetable gardens at residential properties. It was one of those ordinances that had forced the couple to uproot a garden that Ricketts had tended for 17 years.

Ricketts had her vegetable garden in front of her home because that’s where the sun is, as NPR’s Greg Allen reported in 2013: “[H]er house faces south and her backyard is mostly in the shade. A retired architect, originally from Jamaica, Ricketts says she gardens for the food and for the peace it brings her.”

“This is a peach tree that I put in, and around it, I had kale, and in between the kales, I had some Chinese cabbage,” Ricketts said then. “And I also had Swiss chard, yellow Swiss chard.”

More: 

Face exchange: Jimmy for Jacky

Taking a scene from the Shining and exchanging Jack Nicholson face with Jim Carrey’s is as simple as, well, this.

With all the audio manipulation technology out there now and capability to change faces, we’re going to see some election hoopla shenanigans go viral … now and forever more. 🤯😳😱

Racism runs rampant in today’s USA

In response to a concerned mother about her child not getting the best level of education, the high school principal wrote:

“Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” he wrote, according to email records obtained by The Palm Beach Post through a public records request. “And you have your thoughts, but we are a public school and not all of our parents have the same beliefs.”

He went on to say that as an educator he had “the role to be politically neutral but support all groups in the school.”

“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Latson wrote.

That response led the mother to launch a yearlong effort to address what she called a school leader’s failure to separate truth from myth regarding the genocide of an estimated 6 million Jews under Germany’s Nazi regime in the 1940s.

Principal regrets comments

She didn’t doubt that Latson knew the Holocaust was real, she said in an interview, but she feared his reluctance to say so stemmed from a desire to avoid confronting parents who deny the Holocaust’s reality.

I read somewhere that this principal wonders the same thing about whether slavery happened or not.

One question I have, is he religious (likelihood is probable) and if so, does he hold religion to the same level of scrutiny …

Questions. Always more questions.

The Independent: June was hottest ever recorded on Earth, European satellite agency announces

According to the Independent:

Last month was the hottest June ever recorded, the EU‘s satellite agency has announced.

Data provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the EU, showed that the global average temperature for June 2019 was the highest on record for the month.

The data showed European average ​temperatures were more than 2C above normal and temperatures were 6-10C above normal over most of France, Germany and northern Spain during the final days of the month, according to C3S.

The global average temperature was about 0.1C higher than during the previous warmest June in 2016.

Experts have said climate change made last week’s record-breaking European heatwave at least five times as likely to happen, according to recent analysis.

Keeping in mind that weather is not climate, the they tell us we should expect more freakish weather like 3′ of hail falling in Mexico. Our warmer atmosphere is making weather like this more frequent. Ugh.

The disappearing dialect from North Carolina

I have never heard of this dialect located on the outer banks of North Carolina. After leaving North Carolina a few times to travel the world, I was able to better understand the dialect I was born into better. When you listen closely, you can identify the Irish/Scottish/English heritage in the rhythms and pronunciations.

For the record, I can pretty much pick out a North Carolinian dialect out of a crowd. Last week I was on an elevator that rode down next to another elevator. On the other one, there were two guys talking. My head said, “Those guys are from NC.”

“Where in North Carolina are you from?” I asked.

They both looked at me. Looked at each other. One of them said, “Thomasville.”

“Cool, guys. What do you think of Chicago?”

“Like it,” said one.

The other thought a little longer. “It’s different,” he said.

Yeah, it’s different.