Tennessee News

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"In Lebanon, Tennessee, a town of less than 30,000 people, Mike Justice, the public safety coordinator, was so eager to accumulate military goods that he used to wake up at 3:00 a.m. so he was the first person logged in at the government’s first-come, first-serve online store. Thanks to his sleepless nights, since 2007, Lebanon has collected $4 million worth of stuff, including tanks, weapons and heavy equipment like bulldozers and truck loaders. Lebanon’s tank, an LAV 150, has been used only “five or six times” according to Justice, although it did help save a man who tried to commit suicide, spotting him with the tank’s infrared camera...."

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{Small Town Cops Pile Up Military Gear | Wired's Danger Room}

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{Snake pops head through AC vent of car heading down I40 | Tennessean}

* That's not the photo from the story but it had to be included

Hard Knocks

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(Ryan Tannehill, on why it’s important for him to work with the starters) – “Well, I want to be the guy. You don’t want to be a backup. It’s not a goal to be a backup. I want to play and I want to get in there. The more reps I can get with the ones, I feel like that’s more like a game situation as much as you’re going to get in practice.” 

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"Last year, I took a year off to give everybody else a chance to catch up.”

“Are you watching? You been out there? I’m fast as shit.I feel good. I look good. I feel like I’m moving. I feel like a cheetah. I feel…I feel black.”

-Chad Johnson, first media interview
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"Hey Coach, I’m going to go get arrested on my day off.”

-Chad Johnson, episode 1 of Hard Knocks

{Chad Johnson cut by Dolphins following arrest | Miami Herald}

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(Coach Joe Philban, on if tight end Les Brown looks like a football player or a basketball player playing football) – “At times. At times. I would say both. He’s certainly a young player. We all know he hasn’t been in pads. This is a new, kind of brave new world for him. You could probably watch a couple plays and say, ‘Boy this guy doesn’t fit in.’ Conversely, you could watch a couple plays and think he’s a five-year veteran. So I think there’s a little bit of both. I think how quickly he can eliminate those pictures or those film clips where he doesn’t look like an NFL player.)

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{Former College Basketball Player turned Accountant Gets Signed by the Dolphins | The Palms Beach Post}

I'm Amazed

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{ISS Star Trails by Dale Pettit | Continue}

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“Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable–those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.”

-William T Sherman

Get Free

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“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”

— Henry David Thoreau 

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"Parag Khanna’s contempt for democracy aside, he is simply an intellectual impostor, emitting such lethal doses of banalities, inanities, and generalizations that his books ought to carry advisory notices....

When the Khannas discuss the charms of their newly found profession in Hybrid Reality, the whole enterprise is revealed as a jargon-laden farce: “Futurism is a combination of long-term and long-tail, separating the trends from the trendy and the shocks from the shifts, and combining data, reportage, and scenarios.” It doesn’t sound like a very demanding job: “It helps to travel and be imaginative, but it is even more useful to observe children.” And why all this effort? So that we can better predict the apocalypse. “Avoiding civilizational collapse will require harnessing technologies that help us decipher complexity, overcome decision overload, and produce comprehensive strategies.” The Khannas have come to accomplish nothing less than the rescue of civilization....

The recipe is simple. Find some peculiar global trend—the more arcane, the better. Draw a straight line connecting it to the world of apps, electric cars, and Bay Area venture capital. Mention robots, Japan, and cyberwar. Use shiny slides that contain incomprehensible but impressive maps and visualizations. Stir well. Serve on multiple platforms. With their never-ending talk of Twitter revolutions and the like, techno-globalists such as Khanna have a bright future ahead of them.....

When they launched their publishing venture, the TED organizers dismissed any concern that their books’ slim size would be dumbing us down. “Actually, we suspect people reading TED Books will be trading up rather than down. They’ll be reading a short, compelling book instead of browsing a magazine or doing crossword puzzles. Our goal is to make ideas accessible in a way that matches modern attention spans.” But surely “modern attention spans” must be resisted, not celebrated. Brevity may be the soul of wit, or of lingerie, but it is not the soul of analysis. The TED ideal of thought is the ideal of the “takeaway”—the shrinkage of thought for people too busy to think."

{The Naked and the TED | Evgeny Morozov | The New Republic}

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Wut?