I hope everyone had a great weekend...with an adequate supply of dihydrogen monoxide.
Dihydrogen monoxide? Say what?
Spell it out: H2O. Water. Hard to drink enough of it during a heat wave when you're sweating it out almost as fast as you can drink it in. But it makes the difference between enjoying traditional, sultry July weather, and spending most of it in an expensive hospital. (Where people who have "good" insurance may have the opportunity to learn all about a hundred deadly diseases they don't have, yet, before anyone mentions boring old dehydration.)
Though it can also be deadly, of course.
BayerScience(TM) just loves the dihydrogen monoxide story. Greedheads like that implication that all the garbage they want to dump on us is as natural and healthy as pure water. Though that's even a sillier claim than the claim that dihydrogen monoxide should be banned.
Personally, I had typed that entry, had not decided whether it needed to be in a Category or at the top of the post, had noticed a storm coming close, had set the computers to "hibernate" and unplugged them, minutes before all the transformers started popping in a premature fireworks display on Saturday, the Fourth of July.
The heat wave was tempered by frequent rain showers and aggravated by extreme humidity, all week long.
I'm not sure what happened to the linemen. Someone said he'd seen some in the neighborhood. Apparently they got halfway up the ground wire, on the way from the public road to the Cat Sanctuary, and had to stop. Nobody's telling me anything, but a little tree that was not in the way of their work had obviously been spray-poisoned.
Then again, a lot of transformers exploded during the half-hour storm.
During most of the work week I sat around in a puddle of sweat wondering whether the company had had to rush a lineman to the hospital with an acute chemical reaction, or wait for more transformers to come in the mail, or maybe both.
Between a writer prevented from meeting a writing schedule and a bear robbed of her whelps, some reasonable people might prefer to meet the bear. However, when I finally broke down, washed off the existing sweat, put on a clean dry dress, trudged out in search of a phone, and arrived dripping wet on a phone clinger's doorstep, all I actually said was "What happened to the people who were here on Monday? This was not Hurricane Helene. This was the kind of storm we get almost every week in summer." It was Thursday evening. The corporate agent was duly humble, so I didn't need to berate her further, and assured me that my electricity would be working by three o'clock in the morning.
I felt bad about linemen having to work until three o'clock in the morning in the rainforest the Bad Neighbor has allowed to grow around the power line, which had been thoroughly soaked again, not that it had actually dried out since Saturday, but it had been soaked on Thursday afternoon. Possibly that thought gave them an incentive to work efficiently. The lights came on right after midnight and the linemen went home--I hope, to bed.
And yes, although the cat update below was typed a week ago, it's still true as written. Serena is still trying to produce enough milk for three kittens even though she has only one.
Americans Doing Well
US-born blogger on Top 100 list of UK blogs:
Animals
More than most reasonable adults ever wanted to know about sloths.
Cat Sanctuary Update
Local lurkers, this is important...
My resident Queen Cat Serena, "Serena-Seralini" who has coped with glyphosate poisoning by giving birth to a few dozen kittens who just dropped dead at their first whiff of glyphosate vapors, gave birth to kittens last week. I didn't even bother to count them at birth, or note the colors. I was so sure they couldn't live.
Well, of course, most of them didn't. Our Bad Neighbor is still exercising a "right to use" the property he signed over, which he'll claim includes a "right to spray." We need to define that "right to spray" by giving the verb "spray" a direct object. It's ethically acceptable when its direct object is: WATER. There is no such thing as a right to spray poison. Anyone who claims there is needs a long rest in a place with bars on all the windows, and if he can get a lawyer, the lawyer does too. Anyway, the first glyphosate poisoning incident brought the number of kittens down to two. The next one brought the number down to one. The one kitten is a flat "blue" grey, not especially pretty as Serena's kittens go, probably male. I'm like "Why why why couldn't it have been the calico kitten?" But anyway she has this one kitten, and it's a lively little thing; even before its eyes opened it was sniffing around the closet.
The Cat Sanctuary agreed to take another cat family in transition, if necessary. As so often happens in our part of the world, it's not been necessary. I was asked to take these cats if A had not already found a place for them and B refused to keep them until A did. So far what I know is that they've not arrived. In any case those kittens would be much too big to be good playmates for Serena's lonely only kitten.
He shows no Manx features. He may or may not show damage from or extra sensitivity to glyphosate vapors, later on, but he's likely to be a bouncy little boycat who needs a sibling, or siblings, to play with.
Meanwhile...Serena is a large cat who produces large litters of kittens and lavish amounts of milk. Here she was with all this milk and only one small kitten. So...her family are social cats. Her grandkitten Drudge, now three years old, and kitten Silver, now seven years old, are now sharing her milk.
I feel that they're doing this for a reason. Serena did not try to maintain a milk supply for multiple kittens when Zakitty's brothers died. I think something is telling her that this year a kitten, or kittens, will need the milk.
Orphaned baby kittens don't need rabies shots--yet--but I would like confirmation that the mother didn't have FIV.
Immigration
Jeanie from the Marmalade Gypsy blog shared a lovely rainbow-colored map of American ethnicity. I loved the way it blends a surface level at which people in the Blue Ridge Mountains will say their ancestry is "English I guess--we all speak English," until they look it up, and then they might try to identify with one lot of ancestors for a while, and finally they admit that on the Point of Virginia most of us are a mix of three to seven European tribes plus one or more indigenous tribes and it may or may not be possible to identify all of our ancestors and their identities...so what we are is American. If there is such a thing as a plain unhyphenated American we're it. We come from a place where small select groups of relatively civilized Europeans and a select group of relatively sophisticated indigenous people agreed that a multiethnic buffer zone might serve the Cherokee Nation's interests, if and because those people were all capable of living like neighbors, putting the tribal feuds behind them. Possibly we have evolved a step or two ahead of much of humankind.
The trouble is that the map's on nytimes.com, where it has a paywall so I'm not sure I would be able to link you to it. (For a while, at least, you can find it from the link at https://themarmeladegypsy.blogspot.com/2026/07/postcards-from-lake-reflections-on.html .) And it's part of an essay that draws on old, outdated arguments.
Fact: Americans, as we are today, are a nation of immigrants. Even indigenous Americans can often be shown, from archaeological evidence, to have moved into places where other people left, or died out.
Fact: From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Europeans caused a lot of indigenous people to abandon a lot of good land. They did not do this by force of numbers, technology, or personal superiority of any kind. They did it by bringing in filth and diseases. Indigenous people had evolved perfect herd immunity to several of these diseases, such that the diseases had ceased to exist here for a long time. When the pathogens came back, the people died. So the Europeans rushed in. Oh, how they poured in. We became the "trap" in the drainpipe of Europe. Europeans were totally fed up with living, or more precisely dying, in slums. They yearned for wide-open spaces created by the deaths of thousands, millions, of people from diseases to which Europe's herd immunity remained imperfect, so individuals still had high resistance.
Fact: For a nation that was rebuilding itself on a mass of graves, wide-open immigration was a viable idea, and worked for everybody...as long as our population density remained generally low.
Fact: In the early twentieth century the plagues Europeans continued to bring in started to make a dent in our population. But something unprecedented happened: we discovered antibiotics, and other cures for the diseases that had thinned out the huddled masses in Europe. Our population started to become too dense. Like overcrowded animal populations we began to show patterns of decreasing fertility, increasing "sexual deviations" from the norm of simple reproductivity, first, with slower increases in infectious diseases, in loss of individual resistance to diseases, and in antisocial behavior--crowded individuals desperately lashing out in homicide-suicides.
Fact: Americans, as we are today, have to close our doors. Other people have to start controlling their own overpopulation. No other country can count on being able to send surplus young people to America any more.
Fact: It has nothing to do with whether or not we like foreigners. Some people who want to end mass immigration are actively working to help this soldier's translator or this legal immigrant's husband qualify for one of a decreasing number of spaces for legal immigrants, and he's welcome to live in our town if he likes. But there's simply not enough room for them all. Rounding up and deporting the ones who have violated our laws, already, is a reasonable place to start.
I've liked the Mexican people I've known, and I've liked the Colombian people I've known, and I'm not even prejudiced against the people brought into Kingsport to give that city an instant slum, though I mind bitterly that the slum was plopped into the neighborhood where my mother should have had another ten years to live. That's another story. My point is: Rhythm is fine. Color is fine. Spanish is a delightfully minimalist language full of fascinating agglutinative verbs. Spanish-ness is not the problem. And I am poor as the proverbial church mouse myself, so it would be awfully hypocritical of me to mind other people being poor, although I do claim a right to hold opinions about what people do about being poor. And actually, although I speak Spanish slowly and with an accent, although I picked up the sound from acquaintances but learned the grammar and vocabulary from books, I have only pleasant memories of ever having spoken it, so when I hear people speak Spanish in shops and restaurants my feeling is like "Oh cool, she's One Of Us, she knows the special language I used to share with just a few out of my multitude of relatives." I have no problem whatsoever with Mexicans living in the neighborhood that was not, before about 2015, a slum, that had small but reasonably spaced houses a little closer to the factory than the bigger, pricier houses people saved up to retire to. A reasonable number of bodies, at a reasonable density, living reasonably clean healthy lives.
That's not what the people screaming for more immigration want, and it's not what Kingsport got. What the screamers really want is to ruin the nice neighborhoods where it's possible, and in Kingsport it used to be visible, even in your face, to move up the economic ladder. Leftists want to believe in classes, a European phenomenon, where if you're a factory laborer living in a three-room house three blocks from the factory, you're never going to get a better job and you're never going to have friends who have better jobs and your children are never going to be allowed to marry the children of people with money and so on, because Europe had fallen into a dysfunctional thought pattern when Karl Marx was writing. What we actually have are economic tiers through which individuals move. If you're a laborer living in that three-room house three blocks from the factory, and you make frugal choices and have one child or none, by the time your child is old enough to need a room of its own you can afford to move into a four-room house.
In Kingsport, the planned structure of "Snob Hill" meant that the laborer's child might be walking to the same school every day with the boss's child. The retired doctor drove his expensive car through the car wash where the laborers' teenaged children worked, to the same post office, the same library, the same selection of shops, the laborers used. Mother and her friends, mostly about halfway up the "upper" part of Snob Hill, had all started out as twenty-something entry-level "career girls" who might have thought they were doing well to afford a three-room house instead of a basement apartment, and all worked hard, married reasonably well, saved their money, and ended up in...Mother's house technically had eight rooms, but the bigger of the two big rooms on the ground floor had room for everything you'd find in a four-room house, easily. It was hard to overlook the way the social contract said that people weren't born into different "classes" because of their spiritual merits or whatever, but were on different economic tiers from which they could move up or down at will.
Leftists hate that that kind of social contract exists. They want to break it up. So they yammered for more population density, replaced a good midrange shopping plaza with the horrible slum, stocked the slum with drug addicts out of Knoxville and Chattanooga, and watched the neighborhood people wanted to retire to turn--temporarily--into a neighborhood where people didn't want to roll down their car windows. Because tuberculosis.
One kind of opportunist does like it when drug addicts are packed into a new slum. You know what kind that is. They have organized gangs that run parts of Mexico and Colombia. They were there to keep the addicts slowly dying in their puddles of filth--many of them behind what was built, in the Eighties when I was young, as a shiny new upscale office building, especially the bank.
So in due course, this spring, ICE moved in. Did they get all the drug dealers? I don't think so; the original pair were White and didn't sound as if ICE would have had any interest in them. They got some of them. Nobody likes a drug dealer. But nobody I knew received any of those panicky calls about how the only thing Jorge ever did wrong was live with Maria in between the expiration of his original green card and the issuance of his new authorization to seek citizenship. In Kingsport ICE didn't bother with Jorge. They had narcotraficantes to send back to Mexico and Colombia and, if they put those blighters on robot-controlled planes and programmed those planes to crash, that's fine by me. You can still be waited on by real Chinese waiters at the Chinese restaurant, real Mexicans at the Mexican restaurant, your real Pakistani doctor if you're one of that doctor's patients. The big corporations and the state university still have exchange programs. You still see different kinds of people in Kingsport. You see fewer of the ones most likely to harm you.
Nice, ICE.
I think we have to say no to any increase in existing levels of population density. No existing building is empty? No immigrant can move in. I think we can still afford a few immigrants, and I think being able to afford a few immigrants is a good thing, but we cannot afford to admit masses of immigrants any more. We have to recognize the 1950s-style "Don't be prejudiced against immigrants as people" line of talk as irrelevant, a worn-out artefact of today's older generation's grandparents' time.
I doubt very much that people my age and younger are prejudiced against any variety of people--except for the very young, some of whom seem to have been trained to hate their political opposition. Any debate about the amount of immigration we can afford needs to focus on the reality that there's no room for our population to keep growing. In fact we need a population decline--and I for one would rather see that decline come from a combination of fewer couples having fewer babies, and fewer immigrants being let in, rather than the historically more common combination of plagues and wars.
So, clue alert, NYTimes? The year is 2026, not 1956. Write for the audience that is still alive.
Men Behaving Well
Vince Staten:
Music
Donovan.
Mitchell Feeney (John Mitchell and Jim Feeney).
Herbert Pixner.
John Coltrane.
Elijah Bossenbroek.
Olexandr Ignatov.
Stryper (see below).
Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young.
Tom Petty.
Religious Differences
Muslims traditionally throw stones at the Devil. A Christian pop group in the 1980s sang "To Hell with the Devil" (see above). This church...I don't know, there are good things to be said for encouraging kids to visualize spiritual warfare in post-Roman form, but let's just say that for most city churches this skit would have been unthinkable. Because you don't discharge a bullet in a place where it might break someone else's window, or worse.
Technology
AOC calls for restrictions on Big Tech's price inflation and pushes for unsustainable "data centers." Go, girl! Even if her working together with Bernie Sanders on this one means she's going at it the wrong way...you know how, if you need to cut down a tree, you make a few cuts in the wrong direction to encourage the tree to fall in the right direction?
Travel
Martha DeMeo went to Cherokee Town to see how the attractions have been rebuilt. It doesn't look like disaster tourism any more, although it is. What caught my eye were the tailless Tiger Swallowtails...not a new subspecies; they look like the survivors of some predators that have been feasting at a lek site. But MDeM is not a butterfly specialist, nor do you need to be. There are all kinds of other attractions.
