Yes, you can blame someone else.

BBC Two is showing The Men Who Made Us Fat:

Around the world, obesity levels are rising. More people are now overweight than undernourished. Two thirds of British adults are overweight and one in four of us is classified as obese. In the first of this three-part series, Jacques Peretti traces those responsible for revolutionising our eating habits, to find out how decisions made in America 40 years ago influence the way we eat now.

Peretti travels to America to investigate the story of high-fructose corn syrup. The sweetener was championed in the US in the 1970s by Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary Earl Butz to make use of the excess corn grown by farmers. Cheaper and sweeter than sugar, it soon found its way into almost all processed foods and soft drinks. HFCS is not only sweeter than sugar, it also interferes with leptin, the hormone that controls appetite, so once you start eating or drinking it, you don't know when to stop.

Now you know WHO to blame!

Accidental Shooting by Police Chief Who Forgot the one in the Chamber - Of Course No Charges

Local news reports

An upstate New York police chief is recovering after accidentally shooting himself in the hand while cleaning a handgun.

Fort Edward Chief Walt Sandford tells the Glens Falls Post-Star the accident happened Friday while he was working on the 9mm pistol at his home in the Washington County town of Whitehall.

He was taking it apart and didn’t believe there was a round in the chamber when it fired and a bullet passed through his left palm. 

He says the accident happened when he was doing something he’s done “thousands of times,” emphasizing the danger of firearms even in experienced hands.

Would someone please explain to me how anyone could ever, EVER forget there's a round in the chamber. Isn't that the first thing you check when handling a semi-automatic pistol?

If someone were so unfamiliar with guns that they didn't know the difference between a revolver and a semi-auto, I could understand it.  But, these are people who should know better.

Is it like Greg Camp says, that accidents happen, that we'll all human and that I'm expecting too much of gun owners?  I don't think so.

I repeat, one strike you're out.  If you "forget there's one in the chamber" and have a negligent discharge, you lose your right to own guns, period.  If that policy were strictly applied, would the world be a safer place or not?

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Buffalo Surgeon and War Veteran Kills Girlfriend

ABC News reports

 

Domestic abusers who own guns come in all shapes and sized. The one common thread is guns are bad news for women.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Accidental Shooting of Georgia 4-Year-old by Herself - Parents Arrested

Local news reports with video

Gwinnett County police have charged a Snellville couple with child cruelty after their 4-year-old got a hold of a gun and grazed herself with a bullet.

The girl's father told Channel 2's Kerry Kavanaugh he didn't think the wound was very severe, so he never took the child to the doctor.

Police said two days had passed before a family friend called police.

What's your opinion? Black or white, 20-years-old or 50-years-old, this young man did what any good father would do. When staying in a motel with the family, you need to have a gun handy for protection. It's not his fault if his little girl got ahold of it.

In fact, I'll bet he'd instructed his kids to never touch daddy's gun. What else could he do?

The story makes you wonder how many kids suffer minor injuries that are never reported.  That kinda takes the weight out of the pro-gun argument that there are so few.

What do you think?  Please leave a comment.

For Laci

I would like to encourage our readers, especially those who comment, to be very careful that they are not 'sock puppets', people who do not in fact hold any original ideas, but who mouth the words that others provide to them, and who hold ideas that are full of holes and fluff.

For example, I thoroughly doubt that our commenter read up on democide (to the extremely limited extent he has read at all) but rather it would appear he was directed to these ideas by the voices in his head that derive from the gun nut echo chamber of pseudo scholarship. 

Where legitimate ideas and concepts exist, they are twisted and contorted like a rubber Rubik's cubes until the original legitimate concept has had this done to it, trying to hammer it to fit the pro-gunner's preconceptions. so they can cherry pick a small piece out of the debris context to support a failed argument:

how to solve a rubik's cube in 6 seconds

OR, their understanding of the concept someone minimally smarter told them supported their argument is so poor, so distorted, so surreal and intellectually dishonest that it resembles this image more than an actual three dimensional object Rubik's cube:

A word to readers and commenters; it is not sufficient to have read a book once, or part of a book, or to have come across a single web site on the interwebs.  To understand information and concepts, you need a solid existing intellectual structure that is a solid framework to which it can be added.  That pre-existing framework is clearly lacking along with the required building blocks of logic and critical thinking.  A crumbling hole filled "rube's cube" of ignorance (as distinct from the brilliant Rubik's cube) is insufficient.

After watching his clip of Sam and the Truth Snake, but especially in response to his previous post on sock puppets, I'm tempted to add these images as little design feature widgets on this blog.

Don't feed the Sock Puppets

The Easton Flag

Since Dog Gone is going to do a post about Flag Day, I thought I would post the Easton Flag:

This is Easton, PA's take on how the stars and stripes should be rendered. The legend attached to it is that it was displayed on 8 July 1776 for the reading of the Declaration of Independence in Easton; however, there is no documentation for this. I like it because it's not the normal US flag configuration.

Flag Day - cross posted from Penigma

I like the history of our holidays, major and minor.

So in honor of our flag and Flag Day, here is a brief description and history of our holiday.
Flag Day celebrates the adoption of a national flag at the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1777.

Here is the beautifully brief wording:

The Flag Act of 1777 was passed by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1777, in response to a petition made by an American Indian nation on June 3 for "an American Flag."^[1] (As a result, June 14 is now celebrated as Flag Day in the United States.) It reads, in its entirety: "Resolved, That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation." (See Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774 – 1789, 8:464.)

So, you would think that settled the design of our national flag, except that the concept of a national flag as we know it now didn't really exist in the 18th century; it was a later development.

Credit should go to both Wikipedia for some of these images, and to an excellent site, Flag Timeline  of USHistory.org for many of the others.

the Cowpens flag

What the Flag Act resulted in were a number of designs which conformed to that brief wording, including but not only the Betsy Ross flag - although the Betsy Ross flag eventually won the greater recognition.  Here are some of those flags used at the time:

The Francis Hopkinson flag design

and the final selection, the Betsy Ross flag

another Continental Navy flag

the Brandywine flag

note the different proportions

the Forster flag

the Serapis / another

John Paul Jones flag

A New England flag

The Second Continental Congress started out meeting in Philadephia, but then later in the year moved around Pennsylvania to other locations, including Lancaster and York. The national flag came into existence two years to the day of the official establishment of the Continental Army in 1775. 

However there WAS a flag that was flown as early as 1775 by our newly formed Navy, referred to as the Continental Colors.  It differed from the East India Flag ONLY in the proportions of the Canton.

East India Company Flag in 1775

Wikipedia has a full entry on it for those who have a greater curiosity, but here is an excerpt:

In the first year of the American War for Independence, the Continental Congress authorized the creation of a navy. A new flag was required representing the Congress and fledgling nation, and distinguishing from the Red Ensign flying from British vessels.

The Continental Colors were first hoisted on the Alfred, in Philadelphia on December 2, 1775, by Lt. John Paul Jones. The event had been documented in letters to Congress.^[2] The Continental Colors were used by the American Continental forces as both naval ensign and garrison flag through 1776 and early 1777.

It is not known for certain when, or by whom, the Continental Colors' design was created, though the flag could easily be produced by adding white stripes to the previous British Red Ensigns.^[3] The Alfred flag has been credited to Margaret Manny.^[4]

And here is a short bio on Margaret Manny, who is less well known than Betsy Ross.

Margaret Manny was a milliner in colonial Philadelphia who made flags for the United States during the American Revolution.

Manny began making jacks and ensigns for ships as early as December 1774.^[1] She also made the Grand Union Flag, or Continental Colors, first flown by John Paul Jones aboard the Alfred on 3 December 1775.

My thanks to our co-blogger Laci for calling my attention to rich history of the East India Company flag, which preceded our own flag by a full seventy years, as a very British and a very corporate flag, first used in Asia. The East India Company flag stripes were somewhat 'variable' in number, ranging from nine to fifteen which mirrored our own experimentation with stripe numbers. The symbol in the upper left corner, the 'Canton' also changed over time, representing changes in the UK. We didn't pioneer that pattern of alteration to reflect growth and change either.

before 1707, when the Acts of Union

combined England and Scotland

into Great Britain

After 1801 the flag

contained the Union Flag of

the United Kingdom of

Great Britain and

Ireland in the canton

East India Company flag after 1707

But the adaptation of the flag of the East India Company, while strikingly similar is not the only theory for the design adopted by the Continental Congress.



Another theory is based on the family coat of arms of Richard Amerike:

"According to the American Flag Research Center in Massachusetts the heraldic origin of the American flag is not positively known; archives in the British Library confirm that the Stars and Stripes was the coat of arms of the Ap Merike family – and that they pre-date Washington's connection with the continent by 300 years".^[64]

The coat of Arms belonging to the family of George Washington has three stars in chief (at the top) on a white field, with two red horizontal stripes across the middle of the escutcheon, underneath it.  The Amerke basis for the flag is generally considered 'revisionist history'.  Clearly neither coat of arms are as similar as the East India Company flag design, but both provide some insight into the heraldic tradition that was the foundation for flag design.
From Wikipedia:

In any case, both the stripes (barry) and the stars (mullets) have precedents in classical heraldry. Mullets were comparatively rare in early modern heraldry, but an example of mullets representing territorial divisions predating the US flag are those in the coat of arms of Valais of 1618, where seven mullets stood for seven districts.

The thirteen original colonies were the basis for thirteen stripes and the thirteen original stars on the first official U.S. flag, but in the Flag Act of  1794, that was temporarily expanded to fifteen stripes and stars with the admission of the first two new states.  Had that pattern continued, our flag would now have 50 stripes along with the 50 stars.  It is a fascinating insight into how the flag has changed, but also into how the nation under George Washington thought about our national expansion at the time.  It wasn't until the Flag Act of 1818 that the stripes were codified as representing the original 13 colonies, with the stars changing --  with such changeovers always mandated to occur on July 4th -- to represent the number of states at any time in our nation with only the stars.
Here is the order of the states joining, representing each of those stars, because of course there was no official membership or ratification until AFTER the sessions of the Continental Congress:
Delaware (December 7, 1787), Pennsylvania (December 12,
1787), New Jersey (December 18, 1787), Georgia (January 2, 1788), Connecticut
(January 9, 1788), Massachusetts (February 6, 1788), Maryland (April 28, 1788),
South Carolina (May 23, 1788), New Hampshire (June 21, 1788), Virginia (June 25,
1788), New York (July 26, 1788), North Carolina (November 21, 1789), and Rhode
Island (May 29, 1790) (source - Flag Timeline)

This is a singularly striking image from th 1880s that shows some of the various permutations of our flag over the years, from an old textbook (courtesy of wikipedia):