What I watched this week
What I read this week
https://www.instagram.com/lawakinguponthewrongsideof50/I’m attempting a 365 photo challenge on Instagram- here are some of the pics I used, and ones I thought about using…
  • I read that you’re not supposed to keep out more than one or two dog toys. So we keep most of her toys stored away. Betty wasn’t thrilled about this so she pulled out the container and jumped in it to get all her toys…the container is half on the shelf…
Penny close up- she was using me as a pillow…
Chocolate chip

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions or goals?

Percent

No- I do neither

66.67%

Yes- I make goals

25.00%

Yes- I make resolutions

8.33%

Yes- I make both goals and resolutions

0.00%

Today’s poll question is about censorship. Please visit my actual page if you want to participate in the poll

Much of my week was devoted to trying to train Betty and trying to help the pup and the kitty to reach détente…

77 thoughts on “Highlights January 10”

      2. Before he opened Shake a shack, Danny Meyer had a hit dog cart in the park. My daughter was a baby then, and we would walk to the park and there would be, no lie, 50 people waiting on the hot dog line. I used to go after he was out if hot dogs because he made an oatmeal cream cake, one of my favorite snacks, that was so good it wasn’t fair to the rest of the snack cakes out there…

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  2. Is Alex’s book good? My MIL regularly watched Jeopardy. She really liked him! He was a great guy and it is so sad that he died, but he did live longer with Pancreatic cancer than most people do.
    Your pets are so adorable but training a puppy is hard work, its good they are so cute, right! 🙂

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    1. Ok. Here’s my thoughts on the Alex book. I loved Alex…however…in this book he tries really hard to be a regular guy with his stories. It’s written in a very folksy, I’m just like you sort of manner, which just doesn’t work for him, knowing who he is. I thought the last third of the book was fun because it dealt with Jeopardy and wasn’t repetitive in its stories/anecdotes. I think it was average at best

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      1. Thanks for being honest! I get what you mean. One just never knows with books, in which direction they are going to go, even if its about a subject matter that you really like.

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  3. Love that quote of the day- Reminds me of the driving advice I’d give to my kids.. don’t tailgate for the simple reason that you lessen the amount of time and choices you have to react to stupidity.

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  4. The only sphere where I believe some level of “censorship” is warranted, is between parents and their young children. I absolutely believe it is the parents right and roll to teach them to discern, with the end game of working themselves out of a job.

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  6. I know censorship can be a rocky road, or a slippery slope, whichever works for your own point of view, but after the past four years of watching a man use social media is ways that have been divisive, dangerous, and mostly untrue makes me think censorship is not such a bad thing after all.

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    1. Here’s my thing. Back in June a bunch of people told me I should keep mum about things because I just didn’t understand, it wasn’t my place, and I didn’t know anything. I was told what I should look at to improve my understanding. I took two weeks off from blogging…regrouped….and decided that I would make sure that everyone was allowed to speak their mind about anything. No one should tell another to keep mum ever, or that their opinion is wrong.

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      1. It’s a thorny issue, isn’t it? (And btw I think it is reprehensible that anyone would say such things to you. You are an intelligent woman and totally entitled to your opinion.) Yet, what about the T-rump and his followers? Should he be allowed to continue to broadcast bald-faced lies and cause outright insurrection? It’s not so easy to balance free speech with hate speech. Greater minds than mine can take it on. I don’t have an answer, really. But I think if the T-rump had been curtailed from tweeting his incendiary tweets encouraging the Proud boys and those of that ilk then maybe, just maybe, the riots at the Capitol would not have happened. Maybe they would have anyway but he did embolden them with his recklessness. I think there has to be compromise when “free speech” leads to willful harm.

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      2. There were tweets made to March on various government buildings…federal courthouses and mayors offices and governors mansions. Why were those considered OK? There were autonomous zones in certain cities and people were allowed to use social media to have people join the revolution. I don’t like the hypocrisy that one is right and one is wrong. Violence is wrong. Anyone inciting a riot should be charged the same as others. We are walking a very slippery slope. Murder in NYC has gone up 125%. Why doesn’t anyone care about that?

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      3. Dark times indeed. I think social media needs to be held to account here and in every case where such “free speech” is allowed. I think when it infringes upon the health and safety of citizens we need to draw a line. High time the moguls at Twitter, Facebook, etc. etc. faced the music.

        Has the rate of murder gone up that high? I was unaware of that. Truthfully I’ve been burying my head in the sand as far as news goes. It’s just been way too much darkness this past year. I think people do care about that, and about crime in general. In these times of great upheaval people become desperate and that leads to everything from petty theft to murder. It’s a sign of the great social ills that need to be addressed.

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      4. I get an email in the morning from AMNY which is about as close as Manhattan gets to a local newspaper. Since June, the first or second story is how many people were shot, stabbed, attacked or murderer overnight. This includes children in strollers outside of parks in the middle of the day.

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      5. OMG that is awful! I had no idea. I have been insulating myself quite a bit, but these days most of what’s in the headlines is either Covid or the vaccine and not a lot else. Admittedly those are important stories but we need to remember there is still life going on in the midst of this pandemic.

        It’s got to be such a big concern for you and I totally sympathize. I hope this dark cloud leaves us all sooner rather than later. It’s hard to get the attention of anyone in positions of power, tied up as they are with the pandemic. I really have no words – this is so very sad.

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      6. I do news on a need to know basis. I get three emails in the morning with headlines….The Times, the wall St journal and the AMNY. We are all so focused on COVID 19 that we literally aren’t looking at anything else. To be that narrowly focused is not good. Ever. For example, New York State just threw out a bunch of vaccines because the criteria of who gets the vaccine is so narrow they didn’t have candidates to actuall get it, so the vaccines went bad. But that was a plan done by a democrat so who is going to cover that story? We have to stop playing party politics and actually open our eyes to what is actually happening regardless of spin

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  7. The censorship one is a tough one. I don’t believe that you should just willy nilly say unkind/untruthful things and I told my kids not to say them so I suppose I was censoring them. Do I want the media or the government telling me what to say? Not exactly but I do believe that there needs to be truth in reporting. I think we are where we are because of the lies that were allowed to be spread as truth. Most people don’t go the extra step to fact check for themselves.

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    1. You raise an interesting point. Do we need to be responsible for people who don’t choose to fact check? But that would also entail making sure people understand what they read. My mother and I can read something and we interpret it differently. Who’s right? Look at kids with standardized tests where they are supposed to read a passage and give an answer…how many kids don’t get them right? People are going to interpret things based on their education their background and their life experience. Who has the ability to tell them they’re wrong?

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      1. Well, perhaps we should make a ‘rule” that you can’t publish things that are not true in the first place! There used to be something called the Fairness Doctrine that said that you could not print anything unless it was true. Also truth in advertising. Why can’t we go back to that instead of sensational journalism?

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      2. Look at all the major newspapers that have printed things that turned out to be false? My tines just ine of them. Oprah had a book club pick and it turned out the guys memoir was false. With everyone having the ability to publish or post literally anything they want, the name of the game is scoop the competition…to be first. Even in the case of the Atlanta Olympic bomber…the press indicted an innocent man to get ahead in paper sales. And interpretation…I posted a quote last week…everyone saw it slightly differently. People spin things. A few months ago I had discussions with a lefter and a righter who had opposing views(separately) and I used the same set of stats to prove that their points were wrong. It’s the glass half full/half empty thing. Reporting the news should be stating facts. Period. Until everyone does that we are lost. It’s the thought that ine side is wrong and ine side is right that will be the undoing

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    1. I like love stories and I thought Sylvia’s love was just beautifully done. Too many romance/love stories center around sex, but this was done without gratuitous sex…

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  12. I always hit enter before I’m done. I don’t believe in censorship; however, I do believe organizations can create their own rules of engagement (i.e., social media), and I agree that people can and should be banned if they’re promoting violence, BUT I do see this can be a slipper slope.

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    1. I think we have to tread really carefully. I think a lot of people say really stupid things, but I don’t want them to be stopped from saying them. And honestly, I’d rather know exactly what people are saying instead of it being on the dark web, or encrypted or whatever. If it’s out there, we can deal with it. If it’s hidden, we can’t

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      4. How many kids have committed suicide because of stuff posted on social media? We have to fix the root of the problem as to why people treat each other like crap. Why do people think they can treat others so poorly? Until we fix that nothing will ever work

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      6. And think about music that talks about disrespect ing women…or movies that invite violence? Who is the arbiter of what is and isn’t acceptable? Is explicit content warning enough? Then there’s interpretation. I thought WAP was completely degrading to women, yet others thought it empowered them. Who’s right?

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      7. I think there’s a difference between music, which is considered art and a president or any leader insinuating or telling people to go commit acts of violence. Those two are different scenarios.

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      8. Not if people act on the art. The guy who tried to assassinate Reagan had watched Tracy Driver (I think that was it) what about the “video game “ defense? Think about the whole Janet Jackson exposed breast thing at the super bowl. I was mad about that and people told me I was a prude. I thought that song glorified violence against women and Justin Timberlake ripping the shirt was the example of how that went. Leaders most definitely should not incite people to violence in a tweet, but if he did it in song would it be ok?

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      12. And I totally think all the people involved in the capital hill thing should be charged with treason. But I also think the people who stormed that mayors house should also be charged with treason. And the people who stormed the federal courthouse. Social media was used in those instances as well.

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      21. Totally agree. My rant is really more about google taking Parler off google play. I don’t like google having as much say in directing what we see when we search the internet. I don’t want him tweeting orders either. However, I’m worried when the directors of the internet decide what it and isn’t news, and what comes up when we enter a word in the search bar.

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  14. I hope that anyone who picked “No one has the right to censor anyone because I believe in the First Amendment…” needs to go back to Civics 101. The First Amendment applies to government censorship ONLY. Any private individual or business can censor anyone. They may not like it and they may even try to find redress through the courts, but it isn’t against the First Amendment.

    That being said, Betty is adorable.

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    1. True. However, if party A is allowed to say something, is party B allowed to say the same thing? Or, are we allowed to say A is ok but B is not? How does that parley into art? If somebody says something inflammatory via a song, is that given the same weight? Was google play right to ban Parler (or whatever it’s called) yet not ban Twitter?

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      1. I think there will always be those who object to another voicing their opinion (probably all of us, if we are honest). In most cases I prefer idiots and scoundrels to be hung by their words, but I also think there is certain speech – child pornography, inciting violence, yelling “fire” in a theater, as examples – that need to be regulated. My understanding (although I don’t know because I don’t subscribe) is that Parler contains a lot of hate speech and calls for violence. Just like Twitter is a private business and can decide who can play in its sandbox, companies like Google Play can decide who to support. Google Play probably understands that 99% of what’s on Twitter is benign. But, those who incite violence or promote hate on Twitter run afoul of its policies (which, as a private business, they can have) and can face having their account suspended.

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      2. How many kids have committed suicide over things that were said on Twitter? There is hate speech every day in some way shape or form. How do we define benign? I worry about google, which by the very way we now use the word google when we mean to search for something is a monopoly and already directs users to specific sites. Wikipedia has no editorial board, yet how often do google searches end there? We’ve given the internet and social media free reign over everything. I don’t like violence and I denounced it for the part 8 months. I don’t like abuse of anyone or anything, but I mean all things. No one controls the internet. That is a dangerous concept

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    2. This comes down to back in June I was told by a bunch of people to keep mum, not say what I thought because I didn’t know anything, and was given lists of books to read. After told I should keep quiet, I decided my new job was to make sure there was a real good reason to tell someone to be quiet, and that we shouldn’t be hypocrites about who gets to say what when. We are treading in very dangerous water right now, and I don’t want to be at the whim of google as to whether or not my blog is searchable. Or anyone else’s blogs.

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      1. Those people, as misguided as they may have been, had every right to tell you to keep mum… and you had every right to tell them to pound sand (and ban them from further comments, if you wanted to). Funny how one’s free speech can be used to tell another they have to shut up. Being a hypocrite seems to be many people’s favorite sport nowadays and I don’t think that will change soon as we retreat further and further into our preferred information loops. I see what you mean about the power of Google, even if it’s a private company. I really hope we can have a reasonable, rational, national dialog about this, but what are the chances? Most of our communication laws were made well before the rise of social media and they definitely need to be adjusted. Sadly, it appears that reasoned debate and compromise have taken a backseat to accusations without evidence and hyper-partisanship.

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      2. Google is manipulating all of us into thinking they are omnipotent. And we believe. If it’s on google, and it’s the top story it must be true. Well, if someone is derogatory to me or threatens me, like shut up if you know what’s good for you, that is against the 1st amendment because it’s threatening. However, if I was to say something to them, would I be called something in return? On March 3 I have a blog scheduled that sort of beats around this bush. I know you’re speedily getting out your planner so you can jot this down…😉we all want to be heard, but we don’t want to listen. And until we start hearing and listening nothing will be solved

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