TexPx

Jesus Fucking Christ WTF?

Saw one of those sitting on the edge of a pond while we were walking the dogs this morning. Figured it was some kind of Heron. Beautiful bird.

Lots of nice short hikes/walks at the State Park. Closed Canyon Ojita Adentro-waterfall Hoodoos-Cool rock formations Cinco Tinajas

Love it or Leave it!

Also has a bunch of weird movies. I’m in on most anything featuring: Hippies Hitchhikers Hillbillies Punks Bikers Acid…

So even if you don’t want anything to do with this bullshit you have to put to a vote? Another illustration of why you need to vote in these local elections. SECTION 3. Each board of trustees of a school district and each governing body of an open-enrollment charter school shall take a record vote not later than six months after the effective date of this Act on whether to adopt a policy authorizing a campus of the district or school to employ or accept as a volunteer a chaplain under Chapter 23, Education Code, as added by this Act.

The are saying the have offered the same time and format to any legitimate candidate.

The are saying the have offered the same time and format to any legitimate candidate.

Well, Hinijosa did put an amendment in that says they can’t have any sexual predator convictions and have to have background checks. Who decides if they employ chaplains? School Boards?

Sneaky fuckers.

Next step is to go full on with Bob Jones University Press Christian worldview curriculum.

Good job Frisco for keeping two more extremists off our school board.

Oh yeah smartypants? How many people were NOT killed or injured in mass shootings? And furthermore, “But Chicago!”

Famous Cuban sandwich at Havana Cafe on Buckner Blvd.

My den is kinda similar. Assuming you will put a small seating area in front of the FP, I would put a nice slim cabinet to the right of the FP. TV and soundbar on top on a swivel stand. I would lose the mantel(looks tacked on) and put a nice oil painting above the FP.

Friday night.

Crappy quality candid iPhone shot at Dallas Arboretum yesterday. I still like it.

Looks like their population has increased since the Assault Weapon ban expired.

No gun nuts on Surly. Just Gun Owners You do have Truck Nuts. If you want Fanatics you have: Boat Watch New Car Art Airplane Motorcycle Night Vision

That CNN interview was disgusting and embarrassing.

Find the cost of freedom Buried in the ground Mother Earth will swallow you Lay your body down

Thanks for the memories:(

No.

CRIME Fear is cited in rise in gunfire Experts: Shootings of strangers, neighbors due to mixture of factors By DANIELLE PAQUETTE, JOHN D. HARDEN and SCOTT CLEMENT The Washington Post Steve Bridges had just parked his pickup at the Texas Boot Factory when he saw a man — white, maybe 55 or 60 — step out of the car beside him and slip a gun under his belt. It was a Friday afternoon, three days after two cheerleaders opened the wrong car door in a supermarket parking lot nearby and were shot. Bridges, a 63-year-old contractor, had tried to picture how that could happen in Elgin, where eruptions of violence are rare. “It all goes back to the fear,” he said. “Why are cheerleaders getting shot for opening the wrong door? Why is a grown man scared to go into a boot store without carrying his weapon? Why are these people so afraid?” Across the country last month, at least four men opened fire on someone who’d stumbled upon their space, resulting in one death, two injuries and a car pocked with bullet holes. The apparent acts of snap-aggression have reinvigorated the debate around the prevalence of stand-your-ground laws in the United States and a pressing question: Why are people so quick to pull the trigger on strangers? Why did a 65-year-old man kill a 20-year-old woman who had accidentally pulled into his upstate New York driveway? Why did an 84-year-old man fire two bullets into a 16-year-old boy who had mistakenly knocked on his door in Kansas City, Mo.? Why did a 43-year-old man in South Florida allegedly shoot at a 19-year-old Instacart delivery driver and his 18-year-old girlfriend who had arrived at the wrong address? Experts blame a cocktail of factors: the easy availability of guns, misconceptions around stand-your-ground laws, the marketing of firearms for self-defense — and a growing sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that safety in their backyard is deteriorating. Since 2020, the share of Republicans who say crime is rising in their community has jumped from 38% to 73%, according to the latest Gallup numbers from last fall. Among Democrats, that same concern rose only 5 percentage points to 42%, marking the widest partisan perception gap since the polling firm first asked the question a half-century ago. What data shows Reality is more complicated. A Washington Post crime analysis of 80 major police departments’ records found that reported violence across the country in 2022 was lower than the five-year average. And over the longer term, the National Criminal Victimization Survey showed the number of people reporting sexual assault, robbery and other physical attacks is overall much lower now than in the 1990s and has not increased in recent years. Homicides and thefts, however, rose during the pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — though not to the levels of the 1990s. A Post analysis, meanwhile, found that states with stand-your-ground laws had a 55% higher homicide-by-firearm rate in the last two years than the states that didn’t have these laws, which remove the duty to retreat from an attacker before responding with potentially deadly force. The perception that life is getting more dangerous has spread on the right as GOP leaders and pundits repeatedly argued, without evidence, that immigrants and protesters are jeopardizing American peace. Conservative news channels have devoted more airtime to violence than their center- and left-leaning competitors. Over the last three years, for instance, Fox News anchors and guests spotlighted crime 79% more often than those on MSNBC and twice as much as voices on CNN, according to a Washington Post analysis of closed captioning provided by the GDELT AI Television Explorer and the Internet Archive. Fear, paranoia and misunderstandings of the laws governing self-defense and use of force is a recipe for tragedy, said Geoffrey Corn, chair of criminal law at Texas Tech University Law School. “We don’t demand any education for people who own firearms,” he said. “I was a soldier, and we couldn’t touch a live round without completing weeks of basic training.” Paranoia and fear In Bastrop County, Bridges, the chair of the local Democratic Party, said the tension has been climbing for years. Crime in the Central Texas county has ticked up in recent years, though less so than the national average. In 2021, according to the most recent data available, the small city of Elgin reported 13 violent offenses, up from 10 in 2020. Bridges kept his pistol at home and his door unlocked. Did crime seem worse to him? No. Did it seem worse to the head of the local Republican Party? “Crime has gotten worse,” said Curtis Courtney, a retired publisher. “It probably has. We have more illegals up here. We have a lot of people coming from Austin.” Courtney, 70, said he didn’t know why that man had shot the cheerleaders. It was either a grave human error or a criminal act, or both, he figured. But it did not shake his belief that Americans should arm themselves wherever they saw fit. “You have demonstrations in Portland and Chicago getting out of control,” he said. Democrats who say crime isn’t getting worse, he said, “live on a river in Egypt. The de-Nile.” That, he said, is why people carry a gun. “We don’t have a problem,” he said. “The ones who try to bring it against us would have a problem.” Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old white man, told officers he was “scared to death” last month when he shot Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Black boy who had been looking for his siblings and knocked on his door in Kansas City. “It’s the paranoia and fear,” said Lester’s 28-year-old grandson, Klint Ludwig. “It was the 24-hour news cycle — Fox News, OAN, all that stuff — pushing the civil division. Everybody is just so scared all the time.” ‘A detrimental force’ Over the years, he said, his grandfather had become hooked on those channels, echoing talking points that Ludwig, who describes himself as “left-leaning,” found disturbing. He recalled Lester describing migrant children detained at the border as a threat to national security. “Minority groups get scapegoated,” Ludwig said. “The propaganda we see all day, every day was a detrimental force in his life.” The Clay County, Mo., sheriff’s office reported that, according to the latest data, both violent and property offenses in the area dipped from 2017 to 2021. Jerry Nolte, 67, the Republican presiding commissioner of the county and a lifelong Kansas City resident, said he couldn’t tell if crime was up or down — only that people seemed more sensitive to it. “Anybody who watches the news and sees nationwide the kind of crime stories reported are naturally going to be affected by that,” he said. In rural Hebron, N.Y., where Kevin Monahan gunned down Kaylin Gillis last month after she and her friends accidentally pulled into his driveway, residents of the dairy town had gathered in shock. “I blame all this crap on TV,” said George Flint, 70, a Republican councilman. “The fact that you think you can chase somebody off your property like that in this day and age — when you don’t even know who they are — is absurd.” Especially in Washington County, where, from 2019 to 2021, authorities reported just one homicide and four robberies. “My client was involved in a series of tragic mistakes, made by more than one person, that resulted in the death of a young lady,” Monahan’s lawyer told reporters. “He feels terrible that a life was lost.”