Animals
Category 4 furricane by Neithan Hador, on the Mirror, where the software allows the dogs to rotate.
Mental Health
No it's not, Catherine Salgado. The abortion debate has never gone anywhere, never will go anywhere, and makes people tired. When we hear people blaming anything but abortion on the existence of abortion, what we think is that those people's mothers should have chosen abortion.
The Lindsay Clancy "debate" is the result of drug-induced dementia. Clancy knowingly shopped for doctors who prescribed the pills that seemed to make her feel good, for a short time. That is something a lot of people Out There can relate to. People who've been told that "happiness" is a duty, and therefore aren't able to feel it as a pleasure, want to be able to pop pills on their job and walk around unsupervised. Ooohhh, if they couldn't pop their pills every day, they'd be soooo depreeeesssssed. (There is actually some truth in this, because depression is a symptom of many diseases, including addiction to those pills. People who get off antidepressants usually do feel depressed. And they have to put their big kid pants on, recognize that their moods don't matter to anything except perhaps diagnosing their physical disease if it's not obvious, and muddle through life seeking better physical health until one day they realize that they feel a sort of baseline contentment--once they're (a) not sick, and (b) not poking at their feelings all the time.)
People, very wrongheaded people in my opinion, are agitating for their opinion that (1) Lindsay Clancy should have been able to walk around in a drug "high" for as long as she felt "high," and (2) should get the "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict when she finally succumbed to the side effects of the drugs she was on. Since I personally would rather sit on the electric chair than spend my life as a medical experiment in the back of a locked hospital ward, I'm willing to concede Clancy the "right" to suffer. (If, like Jodi Arias, she soon decides she'd rather be in prison, that's not news. We've all heard more than anyone should have to hear about this wreck of a woman. Feed her or don't feed her but don't tell me.)
What I'm not willing to concede is that people using drugs should be walking around unsupervised. If Clancy was released from the hospital, it should have been in the custody of a responsible caretaker, and she should never have been alone with children, should never have been driving a car, should never have been in a room where she could get her hands on a weapon, should not have been allowed to wear hard-soled shoes, for the months or year or so it takes to identify which SSRI users are going to develop "Prozac Dementia." The debate is about drugs, and people who mindlessly try to dig up the dead abortion debate and drag that in are Part Of The Problem.
It's for reasons like this that I couldn't even consider a job for which I was recommended. I'm not yet a real Chesterton scholar since most of Chesterton's books were out of print for most of my life, but I could easily be one; the man was super-popular in his day because his writing voice was so easy to read and like. I decided not to make a BA in English Lierature my educational goal, but I was close to earning one; the last time I seriously considered enrolment in a college, I was told I'd qualify for the BA in one more four-month "semester." Since then I've had thirty years' more reading. And writing. And writing about reading. I could buy "equivalent experience" BA's in English Literature from every university that recognizes "equivalent experience" if I had the money and wanted to waste it that way. (Actually, I enjoyed the course work; if I went after the BA I'd want to sit through the classes in English Literature, including the ones I sat through in 1984 since teachers and students probably have a different take on the classics by now.) Given four months I could be as familiar with Chesterton as I am with his readers, critics, admirers Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis. And it would be fun. What I could not do is present Chesterton's work from a modern Catholic perspective. There is no way I could join a church that programs people to parrot-squawk "abortion" when they're hearing a jury debate about the moral responsibility of a drug addict.
Clancy is not a representative of the group "women." She is not a representative of the group "Northerners." She is not a representative of the group "nurses." She is a representative of the group "drug addicts, specifically prescription drug addicts who develop homicide-suicide thinking as part of the classic, unmistakable pattern of serotonin-booster reactions commonly known as Prozac Dementia." It is supremely unhelpful to drag in claptrap about her being a woman, or even about her victims being children, because Prozac Dementia is not sex-specific at all. Most cases don't even become famous any more--and when the cases have been reported in detail Lilly, and other pharmaceutical companies, have bribed newspapers to suppress the very relevant information which drugs the homicide-suicides were on. Basically, men occasionally develop homicide-suicide thinking all by themselves., because they are biologically disposable and their average level of sanity is lower, but only SSRIs allow women to start planning homicide-suicides just like men and are involved in the majority of violent crimes committed by women. Male homicide-suicides may be--I've not seen honest large-scale studies of this--more likely to attack people at work or school, females to attack people in "the home," but either a man or a woman who is under the influence of these drugs may decide to attack strangers on the street.
Meanwhile, let's say this to the morons who are seeking attention by posting on social media that women would be less depressed if they all went home and had too many babies: Women who go home and have babies are the ones who are likely to kill those babies. When "home" and "work" are the same thing, there's no selection between two places to act out homicide-suicide thinking, so automatically the kiddies are at greater risk. If Clancy tells us anything about the lifestyle choices "women" should make, it's that "women" should not have babies. There are too many humans on this planet anyway. Women who reach menopause baby-free should probably be given medals with cash awards attached.
"Happy," "fulfilled" mothers all...wrong. Real happiness about the achievement of motherhood starts after the child is 20 or, in some cases, 50 years old...and these fifteen young women were very, very unhappywhen they stayed home and had babies. Not because abortion exists. Because the pills they were encouraged to take made them feel worse not better.
Murder
Some statistics, in case you want to squelch one of the crazier trolls Out There:
Approximately 14,000 murders were reported last year.
Nobody likes to give up hope that a murder suspect will be found and the case can be brought to trial, but in 2025 about two out of three murder cases were brought to trial.
For murder cases where a suspect was brought to trial, nine out of ten suspects were male.
Both men and women try the "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense, and in some cases the "temporary insanity" defense. "Temporary insanity" works, when it does, usually in cases where the defendant had just been beaten or raped and then saw a chance to take revenge on the assailant. People who can convince a jury that they were lying in the lawn, bleeding, playing dead, and they saw the attacker sit down at a nearby bus bench and spread out their newspaper, and so they remembered where a large rock happened to be, etc., have a chance of getting off with a verdict of temporary insanity. They might be ordered to go to counselling or do some sort of service, but nobody thinks they're dangerous to ordinary people. "Temporary insanity" worked for Lorena Bobbitt and would probably have worked for Jodi Arias if she hadn't told such a wide variety of misleading stories.
People who kill strangers or children don't have a hope of that kind of outcome, though. "Not guilty by reason of insanity" presupposes the kind of psychosis from which sufferers are never going to get out of the hospital. Google doesn't have an estimate of how many murder suspects, altogether, have tried to get ruled "not guilty by reason of insanity." Google does quote unnamed sources as saying that about 70% of suspects who try this line of defense quickly drop it as they realize it carries penalties many find heavier than a prison sentence, and that about 1 in 400 men who try it get the verdict they want. (People often don't think of male homicidal rage as being insanity, though male anger addiction is definitely part of a physical disease pattern that involves the brain and could be classified as a psychosis.) In a nation the size of the US, 1 in 400 means that some 300 to 500 men are found violently insane and sentenced to life in hospitals rather than prisons, every year--and if the victims weren't famous and the crime had not become a media circus, these men's families usually do all that they can to keep the stories out of the news media.
For those with a higher tolerance for true crime stories than I have, Wikipedia does have a long list of people who achieved some degree of notoriety by being ruled not guilty by reason of insanity. The plea has historically been more likely to work for women than for men.
Music
Bob Dylan.
The Young Tradition. (I was fascinated by the clear vocal harmony, free from guitars or drums, as a teenager. I wore out their LPs, marvelling at the fact that I was able to hear different vocal parts in each song.)
Pure Prairie League.
Roy Milton.
The Midnight.
Wynonie Harris.
Hugo Kant.
Big Joe and the Dynaflows.
Dolly Parton.
Natalie Imbruglia.
R.E.M. Oh, but Youtube really doesn't want to play this song. Millions of people listened to it on the radio. Maybe it was the images, on the video, of kids crawling around inside a moving vehicle the way we all somehow survived doing. Youtube made me click through a couple of warnings and then displayed an ad for a suicide prevention hotline before playing "Everybody Hurts." Seriously, Youtube, don't you think that people who want to replay this slow, saddish song have survived any suicidal tendencies it might have triggered back when we were young and hormone-raddled?
Jesse Welles. (It's appropriate to mention that a real blast of ladybird scent wafted in from the window while I was listening to this song. The False Lady beetles who crawl into houses for the winter aren't my favorites; if they're going to broadcast their scents as mating attractions I would prefer they do it out in the garden, but in a neighborhood infested with the kind of loathsome parasite that sprays poison into the air with the intention of harming human beings, any survivor "bug" is a good "bug.")
George Harrison.
Zac Brown Band.
Crystal Gayle.
George Strait.
Tanya Tucker.
Alice in Chains.
Nanci Griffith.
Tom Petty.
Canned Heat.
Traffic.
Cream.
Grass Roots. (The moderator at the forum where this was shared noted that it's not a very wise "message song." It's an historical artefact. If this web site particularly endorses the content of any song linked in the Music category, we'll say so. We recommend that people who are free to listen to music and move their bodies while connected to the Internet use these links for exercise breaks as defined by them. We think quite a lot of songs shared here would be absolute rubbish if used as guides to life.)
The Church.
Kris Kristofferson.
The Beatles.
Incredible String Band.
Steeleye Span.
Mark Knopfler.
Paolo Conte.
Spirit.
Avishai Cohen.
Chic.
Queen.
Pavel Szabo.
Joni Mitchell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt2pceRSUMU (from the early stages of video recording, this one came flagged as "terrible recording, but fun")
Pretenders.
J.J. Cale.
Quote
Suitable for cross-stitch or needlepoint...
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Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman. —Joan Jett, American Rock Singer
"
Travel
It doesn't have much of a trunk, but Italians are proud of their Stone Elephant, a natural sculpture formed as decaying bits of rock dropped away.
