Web Log for 2.5.26

Health News 

Pathetic. Even with this weakening clause, the vote to ban paraquat in Virginia wasn't unanimous. Dealers have to be able to sell, and buyers use up, their remaining supplies! We can't just collect this stuff and dispose of it as the toxic waste it is! Honestly, the people who drag their feet on these badly needed bans deserve Parkinson's Disease.

https://lis.virginia.gov/bill-details/20261/HB1375/text/HB1375AHC2

Marketing

Sex sells...sex. At least, to those who are in the mood. Sex distracts attention from what sex is being used to sell. So when advertisements show an underdressed young woman standing beside a car, most of the women who see the ad turn away since, most of the time, we're not in heat. Most of the men do think about young women. And they forget all about the car. 

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2026/02/sex-sells-what-does-it-sell-not-me.html

Morgan Griffith on Energy Regulations

Editorial comment: This is all very well put, but what I want to know is that any new energy regulations will require APCo, PEPCo, and Dominion to be paying all willing customers for solar energy we collect for them before they can even propose any nuclear power plants. 

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-Va-9:

"

A cornerstone of American power and success is predicated on our manufacturing might.

As factories transition in the 21^st century, new technological innovations boost American industry and support more efficient and productive manufacturing activity.

For example, new technologies could help coal plants burn coal cleaner with reduced emissions.

Accordingly, many domestic manufacturers are interested in seizing the moment by adopting 21^st century innovations.

However, many manufacturers from furniture makers to steel manufacturers seek to make efficiency modifications or improvements to their facilities and plants. And yet, they often refrain from doing so.

This is because of something called New Source Review (NSR).

NSR regulations fall under the Clean Air Act.

Once triggered, the NSR process can jeopardize the air permit for the entire manufacturing facility.

Accordingly, a plant could be put out of business, even though the efficiency upgrades would result in a net reduction in plant emissions!

One example that I frequently cite is the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture manufacturing plant in Galax. 

When I have toured the plant, I have viewed the plant’s production process and the work of its craftsmen.

This facility possesses what I call the “long conveyor belt to nowhere.”

It was clear that this “conveyor belt to nowhere” did not serve a meaningful purpose. At the very least, it made the production process less efficient.

To most people, it would make sense to rearrange this feature and save production time on every piece of furniture manufactured there.

However, lawyers for Vaughan-Basset advised the factory that removing any part of the conveyor belt system could possibly trigger an NSR analysis, thus threatening the entire facility’s air permit and thus the legal ability of the plant to operate.

Accordingly, they do not touch the “conveyor belt to nowhere.”

You may ask, “why should I care?”

And the answer is this.

Vaughan-Bassett is an American manufacturer. It competes with Asian furniture manufacturers.

Every second, every minute that is added to the process reduces the efficiency of the manufacturer and adds costs to the production.

We will never beat the Asian countries on wages. Nor should we.

But we can be more efficient. NSR in many cases prevents us from being more efficient and more competitive in the marketplace.

These NSR issues pose challenges to manufacturers in Virginia’s Ninth District and across the country.

Accordingly, for multiple Congresses, I introduced legislation to correct this misguided practice to deliver clarity for American manufacturers and promote plant efficiency improvements. 

This year, my New Source Review Permitting Improvement Act was considered by the House Committee on Energy Commerce, on which I serve.

During remarks on my NSR reform bill, I highlighted that numerous industry groups and labor unions support my bill. That includes the United Mine Workers of America, the National Mining Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As debate occurred on my NSR reform bill, Committee Democrats introduced several amendments.

One such introduced amendment happened to unintentionally target Appalachian communities!

The Democratic amendment proposed that my reform bill could not apply to any facility or plant that uses any electricity generated from coal.

Therefore, under the Democrats’ amendment, any coal plant that generates electricity or any facility that uses coal-generated electricity would likely not be able to make efficiency upgrades!

There wasn’t even a limit. It was a blanket application to all facilities with coal-generated electricity, regardless if the facility needs 90% of its electricity generated from coal or 1%.

Therefore, our manufacturing plants would be barred from using the reforms to improve their facilities!

I raised my objections to the proposed amendment during the hearing.

I specifically outlined the threat that such an idea would pose to Virginia’s Ninth District and central Appalachian communities at large.

Facilities in our region rely on coal for electricity purposes and industrial processes. By handicapping our manufacturers in the Ninth District, our factories would lose business and we would lose jobs.

The consequences could be devastating for our communities.

Luckily, we defeated the Democrats’ amendment and my bill was reported favorably by the Committee.

However, this episode illustrates just how out of touch DC Democrats are on energy policy and exposes their radical zeal to eradicate coal from our energy mix.

If DC-style Democrats get their way, we will see even higher costs on our electric bills and less reliability.

I will continue fighting against anti-coal policies and promoting commonsense energy policy to ensure we have the backs of American manufacturing workers.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at https://morgangriffith.house.gov/. 

"  

Book Review: Little House by Boston Bay

Book Review: Little House by Boston Bay

Author: Melissa Wiley

Date: 1999

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-440737-3

Length: 195 pages

Quote: “This Francis Scott Key is a fine poet. My hired man says folks have set it to music already—you know that old air ‘Anacreon in Heaven’?”

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote nine books about her early life. Although fictionalized enough to preserve people’s privacy (in real life there were six children, in the books only four), the books were based on facts. They were recommended to, and often enjoyed by, middle school readers partly because of their wealth of accurate historical detail. Eventually the books inspired the Little House on the Prairie TV series and enabled Mrs. Wilder’s nieces and nephews to preserve a family museum as a tourist attraction.

Nieces and nephews had to operate the museum, because Mrs. Wilder’s one daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, had no children. Mrs. Lane did, however, bond with younger protegés, particularly with Roger Lea MacBride, who produced the TV series and later wrote his own series of stories based on the childhoods of Rose Wilder Lane, of Caroline Ingalls (Laura’s “Ma”), and of her mother and grandmother. Well ahead of their time, these women had learned to read at an early age and left enough letters and diaries to allow book-length reconstructions of their childhood memories.

The ancestor of Rose Wilder Lane who was a child when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a new song was Charlotte Tucker, born in 1809. In this book, she’s a little girl just starting school, much interested in songs, recipes, and war news...the kind of thing it takes to make a five-year-old’s sheltered little life into a book older children and adults will read.

As a fictional character Charlotte lacks some of the individuality Laura Ingalls Wilder was able to give herself and sister Mary, even when she wrote about them as five-year-olds. Wiley has, however, given her a thoroughly researched historical background. Her story is recommended to middle school readers who prefer their history dramatized rather than simply narrated. 

Book Review: The Light Fantastic

Book Review: The Light Fantastic

Author: Terry Pratchett

Date: 1986

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-102070-2

Length: 241 pages, plus appendix, crossword puzzle, and ads for otherr books

Quote: “The very fabric of time and space is about to be put through the wringer.”

There are lines in The Light Fantastic, like the quote above, or like the opening—“The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort. Another Disc day dawned, but very gradually, and this is why...”—that could be mistaken for Douglas Adams’. Don’t be deceived. Discworld is a different, more optimistic place than Douglas Adams’ ultimately tragic universe.

Then there are lines like, “‘Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instru­ments, can you believe that?’ ‘Yeah,’ said Rincewind, picking up a knife and test­ing its blade thoughtfully. ‘Luters, I expect’,” that could be mistaken for Piers Anthony’s...but although Anthony was the one who steered me to Discworld back in the 1980s, Discworld is a different, ultimately less optimistic place than Xanth.

Anyway, this is one of the long, rambling Discworld comedy/fantasy series. All of Discworld is threartened, although you have to read ar good way into the book to find out by what it’s threatened this time, and it must be saved by Rincewind the incompetent magician, and Twoflower the planet’s first tourist, and Twoflower’s Luggage, a rather appealing creature in its own right...and since the suspense in this kind of book consists of finding out how they all reach the improbable happy ending, that’s probably as much as a review should disclose.

This book is recommended to (a) readers who don’t know Discworld yet, but enjoy logical nonsense, and (b) readers who came to Discworld late and need the early volumes (this is volume two) to complete their collections. 

Long & Short Reviews: No Plans to Watch the Super Bowl

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks whether we plan to watch the Super Bowl; why or why not.

Well, that's good for a short post. I don't plan to watch anything in my TV-free home. There have been years when I've been enticed into someone else's home to watch a professional sports event. The local lack of popularity of the teams involved makes it unlikely that that'll happen this year.

I am seriously interested in sports events when the kids playing, or cheering, or playing in the band, are related to me or to close friends. Otherwise, I can take them or leave them alone. 

I do have some tiny residual vestige of preference for some teams, based on where they call home, who's playing, and who else used to cheer for them in my family:

The Washington team, even in sports I don't watch, because Washington is my city. I even knew a few of "our" players; in fact a Washington Redskin who played for one season and then became a school coach was a masseur to whom I used to refer some clients.

The Green Bay Packers, because my father and an uncle used to cheer for them.

The Baltimore Ravens, because my husband used to cheer for them when I was cheering for "our" Redskins, just to make things interesting, he said.

The San Francisco 49ers, because the boyfriend used to cheer for them and they were a good team, that year, having both Jerry Rice and Steve Young.

The Indianapolis Colts, because my Significant Other used to cheer for them, because it was politically incorrect to like them. A colt is a young horse, a lovable lifeform that makes a good mascot, but the Colts got their name from a man whose ancestors might have raised or trained colts--who knows?--who made his fortune selling firearms. 

But, Seattle? New England? A team based that far away would really have to own a sport to have any following here, and they've not done it. Yet.

Web Log for 2.4.26

Rain at least compacted the snow, and cleared enough space on the road that the odd jobs man's utility vehicle was able to come up just as the animals in the neighborhood started to run out of feed. The cats got an inferior grade of kibble, explained as the only kind left in the store, and were glad to see kibble of any grade again. I'm low on human food, but if no more snow falls I expect to be able to pick my way out with a stick when I run out of human food. Deliveries will certainly be welcome; dangerous heroics are not necessary.

Books 

Would you, too, like to receive more free romances than you can read? Click here.

Tolkien and his dragons...why he called the big bad dragon Smaug.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/tolkiens-dragons-and-ours

Bookshop is doing a promotion of new nonfiction for Black History Month. I recognize only a couple of reprints in their list. Let's just say that all books by Zora Neale Hurston are interesting--she was quite an interesting person, and a gifted writer--and may become your favorites, and all libraries for grades seven and up need a copy of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. The others, well, they're on sale and may be good. Buying them through the link below will help the Cat Sanctuary.

https://bookshop.org/lists/black-history-month-2026-nonfiction

Cybersecurity 

Whatever did I say that multiplied my readership by five? Satisfactory numbers of readers are in the US, in Germany, and in Brazil, but why are four or five times as many in Vietnam? Heads up, Google! Masses of views from a country that one has not been writing about, where one does not know a lot of people, tend to come from organized spammers and scammers. If people in Vietnam are actually reading this blog, that's a different thing, and they're welcome. But I suspect these views are coming from digital malware.

Health News 

Currently used MMR vaccine does not necessarily give immunity to measles:

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-mmr-vaccine-does-not-guarantee-protection-against-measles/

And some scientists think some vax really can trigger autism in some patients, though the explanation of why they don't have that effect on most patients is strictly theoretical.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/scientists-publish-map-aluminum-vaccines-can-cause-brain-injury-triggers-autism/

Politics

(The rant was written in response to some headlines that didn't really need links; you've already seen them.)

The hush of the snow dampens the clamor of politics, and for those who turn on the news the brawls of idiot Yankees are there to distract attention from what our Spamburger is quietly doing with the legislature--ramming through all the new legislation we do not want, including "sanctuary cities" rubbish so we can reenact the Minneapolis civil war right here. 

The Left are gushing emotion in that hammy, fakey, out-of-touch way that make me wonder how much, if any, of it they actually feel and, if so, how much of it actually has anything to do with the events they rant on about. Oh, oh, woe and wail, poor little Renee Good was so good and poor little Alex Pretti was so pretty and we just know they are in Heaven now, though if anyone on the Right mentions Heaven they're the first to sneer at the antiquated fairytales to which we bitterly cling. It gets nauseous.

Renee Good was a homicidal motorist. She may not have seen herself that way. Most of them don't. They're just a little bit careless, had just one drink too many, didn't think it would matter, until they've hit somebody. We all saw the video: Good's car, or would you call it a van, SUV, whatever, bumped the agent. Good's driver slammed on the brakes. Good squawked "Drive, baby, drive." At that point the agent shot her and, fine man that he undoubtedly is, he let the driver live, which is more than I would have been likely to do in that situation. Are the Left grateful? They are not. Though according to someone at Quora Good's last words were "I'm not mad at you." Did she mean the driver or the agent? Who knows? Who, actually, cares? Somehow I don't think the hysterical left-wingnuts do. I think, if Good had been a Republican and had hit a street cop when not protesting an order given by President Trump, the people screaming loudest about her death would be celebrating it.

Alex Pretti was, we are told, a nurse. On what hospital's payroll, then? Oh, he was a volunteer nurse. Maybe he was. Maybe there's a hospital that doesn't snap up a young healthy male nurse who is qualified. The financial situation in most American businesses has been deeply weird since the COVID panic, so I'm not saying it's not possible. Anyway what we all saw on video was Alex Pretti kicking in the taillight of a motor vehicle. Approached by policemen, he ran. Surrounded by policemen who ran faster than he, he reached for a loaded handgun, putting left-wingnuts into the position of having to defend his right to bear arms. His apologists claim he had been trying to "comfort a woman." That wasn't on the video. In the last minutes of his life Pretti was not concerned about comforting anybody.

But it may be true. Alex Pretti may have been trying to comfort a woman who wanted to keep beside her some man who had just been loaded into the vehicle he was kicking. Renee Good may even have been trying to feel whatever she thought forgiveness to be toward the agent who shot her. 

Nicki Minaj, that well-known spiritual teacher, outraged some people who preferred her when she was singing, or screaming, whatever, about sex and drugs. She supports the President. Roseanne Cash, a quiet and independent musician who doesn't need to try to be a celebrity like her father, outraged some of her fans, too. She supports the protest. 

Let's put it this way. Some of the "refugees" and "would-be immigrants" the Left wanted to bring in to prop up Social Security are, in fact, the scum of the earth, not welcome back in their native countries and not welcome here, and if they're loaded onto leaky ships no one will shed one tear. And then some of them are the salt of the earth, and have more right to be here, more right to be breathing up oxygen in this world, than some people who were born here. I am, Donald Trump, related to an outstanding example of just how vile it is possible for a Virginia gentleman to be. Why don't you send him to Somalia and give some "immigrant" who is willing to work a decent job that pays White man's wages.

I don't hate Nicki Minaj if she wants some creep who's been stalking her deported. I don't hate Roseanne Cash if she wants some friend of hers to be able to stay here. What's going wrong with all of us, anyway, that we're letting ourselves be so "polarized' about this? Who benefits from our being "polarized," anyway? Well...the cause of global tyranny does. The cosmic Evil Principle does. Do you believe anyone else does?

Faith of our fathers! we will love

Both friend and foe in all our strife...

Where are the Christians loving and supporting one another across this present strife? 

Tom DeWeese asks whether the Rs have a plan to win elections this year:

https://americanpolicy.org/2026/01/30/a-challenge-to-republican-conservative-forces-whats-your-plan-to-win/

I think practicing good will toward our foes in this strife (which does not mean letting them win any elections) might work.

Zazzle 

A new trend is giving bags of coffee as favors at parties that may run far into the night. For each gift-sized bag you buy, $1 goes to help protect butterflies and their habitat.

https://www.zazzle.com/brown_coffee_bag-256809710256096542