Book Review: War Is a Racket

Title: War Is a Racket

Author: Smedley Butler

Date: 1935

Length: 35 pages

Publisher: heritage-history.com (PDF)

Quote: "A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people."

It's unfortunate that this retired Marine officer's book has been best remembered by left-wingers who, in the Cold War era, seized on the idea that the path to peace lay through falling into the hands of the Soviet Union just as Khrushchev said. What General Butler had to say about the corporate interests behind the wars of his day--and he ought to have known if anyone would, having been more decorated for more overseas military missions than anyone else alive at the time--and the poor compensation of veterans is a valuable historical document. This document has been made available in PDF form.

I recommend everyone read it. Just read it. Draw your own conclusions, from your own historical hindsight. If the computer on which you're reading this does not handle PDF well, e-mail to discuss the format and consequent cost of your printout. If your computer does handle PDF well, click here to read or download the mini-book free of charge.

https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societies/ebooks/pdf/butler_racket.pdf

Authors I Wish More People Knew About

Regular readers of this web site probably do know about them by now. Ten off the top of my head, alphabetical order...unfortunately, although I started raving about these writers while they were alive, in some cases that was a long time ago. 

1. Joan Aiken 

Conrad Aiken, who was rated high as a poet in his day, was the father of two internationally renowned authors of genre fiction, Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodges. Genre fiction was considered sort of opposite to poetry or "great" fiction, in their century, the twentieth. So, both daughters could write their "frivolous stuff" and get paid for it without competing with their father, and they did. Jane Aiken Hodges did it well. I think Joan Aiken's frivolous fiction is great in its own way. Her superpower was drawing even me into even Regency Romances, at an age when I was not buying or reviewing books for resale and would not normally touch a Regency Romance with a ten-foot pole. 

2. K.A. Ashcomb 

Nobody else will ever write like Terry Pratchett, and nobody else should try, but this young writer has admittedly studied Pratchett's techniques at length, and uses them to good effect in writing a different kind of stories. 

3. Wendell Berry 

A lot of people have known about Wendell Berry for a long time. An early contributor to Organic Gardening & Farming, Mother Earth News, etc., he wrote excellent essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism. Berry fans tend to be quiet inconspicuous people who enjoy feeling just a little bit like a revolutionary cell--his work is too Green to be promoted by corporate interests, though also too popular to be completely snubbed by the commercial media, a situation that seemed to amuse Berry and his fans inordinately for an inordinate length of time. 

4. Emily Dana Botrous 

She's broken out of the Book Funnel. This is a young writer, still pounding out potboilers while raising small children; in another twenty years she may be great. Currently what she writes are romances, but much more thoughtful, insightful, than the average romance. And she writes honestly about the Blue Ridge Mountains as they really are today; though also about other places. 

5. Anna Dale 

Author of frivolous fantasies for children, but also the author of the statement that Amber-Eyed Silver Tips are "the creme de la creme of witches' cats." So she obviously has things to say about the real world.

6. Suzette Haden Elgin 

She wrote about the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, she wrote whimsical science fiction, she basically invented the genre of science fiction poetry, and she had one of the first and best blogs, still available "as a memorial" at ozarque.livejournal.com. Always with wit and charm and a writing "voice" that could only belong to a Southern Lady. In each of the niches to which her writing appealed, her writing quickly formed a small hard core of admirers. I'm one. I even admired her crocheting...and I'm a knitter. 

7. Ruth Ozeki 

A year of writing documentaries for TV that were sponsored by a cigarette company, and required each episode to show someone smoking the sponsor's cancersticks, too, prompted a debut novel called My Year of Meats, in which a fictional TV documentarian is supposed to give Japanese audiences a better impression of beef, but every show she and her crew work on gives them a worse impression of the beef industry. Pretty frank about the effects of synthetic hormones on humans--the protagonist tries to have a baby (though she's not married) and fails, her boss is impotent and blames his wife, a man she interviews is somewhat "feminized" although a grandfather, a five-year-old girl is suffering premature puberty--but that kind of thing does come up when we study the facts on this topic. When this novel came out I reported to the Friends of the Library that its one fault was that "it does nothing to break up the stereotype of Japanese people being perfectionistic overachievers; it is a perfectionistic overachievement." Enough reviewers made that kind of noises that Ozeki made her other books quite different from My Year of Meats. But still excellent. 

8. Laurence J. Peter 

Best remembered for the assertion of The Peter Principle (an early book) that everyone is promoted to per level of incompetence. He wrote further books about his further observations of Life. 

9. Barb Taub 

The only mom-com books that have made me laugh out loud as often as hers did were early Erma Bombeck. I don't know why she's not a super-seller, as Bombeck was. It's not radical political views; she's such a moderate D she's married to an R. She writes within the rules. I think it's just that although mom-com is still madly popular with actual readers, it doesn't fit into the left-wingnut agenda that dominates the conglomerate of what used to be the big publishers.

10. Iris Yang

So far, this living writer's been best known for a series of novels about how to be an excellent human being, in the specific context of the Flying Tigers, a real group of Chinese pilots who teamed up with the US Air Force in the 1940s.

Web Log for 9.15.25

Status update: Over the weekend the Bad Neighbor, who has been warned to stay away from other people's property but not locked up, was out spraying poison daily. I didn't see him, since he's cleared an old path that bypasses my property, but I definitely smelled the evil wind that carried "Roundup" vapors. I'm having a worse than usual reaction to a higher than usual concentration of New Roundup--whatever's in this month's version--anyway, nausea and vertigo interfered with typing this morning. That's rare for me; typing is my symptom-buster. I ran out of charcoal; I don't maintain big stockpiles of anything as a good prepper should, but you can't really have too much edible charcoal so local lurkers are welcome to drive by and donate bottles if they've been at Wal-Mart lately. (CVS, last time I looked, sold charcoal tablets for a much higher price.) Anyway, at the time of writing I'm sitting up and typing, so on the road to recovery. What will really help is rain. AND A BAN ON SPRAYING ANY CHEMICAL OTHER THAN H2O INTO THE AIR OTHER PEOPLE BREATHE.

I used to think we could trust the legal process to help identify the chemicals that are doing the most damage--to humans, to butterflies, to our pets, to wildlife, to the animals we raise for food. I've learned that we can't. Nothing short of a crackdown will help and I pray that Secretary Kennedy will push one through the legal process soon. We need NO GMO products outside sealed laboratory facilities--I've seen no evidence of harm done by raising GMO plants for fuel and industrial use, but they should not be sold as food--and NO CHEMICAL SPRAYS. If you feel sorry for me feeling too sick to type this morning, please share your thoughts and feelings with your elected representatives. 

And this laptop is running low on memory. What an incredibly small part of a computer's memory is taken up by the actual programming we use and the actual data we store; what a lot by spyware and unnecessary "updates." It's a Toshiba. The local wizards can do anything with HP's; with a Toshiba the results of adding memory, etc., can't be guaranteed. How well I'll be able to make the transition to Linux can't be guaranteed either. I know I WILL NOT be getting a "new" computer and I WILL NOT be using any Microsoft products. How well the new-to-me system will work remains to be seen. Let's just say that if I blink out of cyberspace, it's much more likely that the computer's died than that I have. 

(By mid-afternoon I was able to walk, slowly, and handle objects without losing balance. I don't expect any long-term damage has taken place. I just wish it would rain.)

Animals

Precious puffins, and an adorable otter:

https://itsjustlife.me/kachemak-bay-and-beyond/

(Beth Ann Chiles is still doing Comments for a Cause. I think choosing Oxfam shows lack of imagination, but had to comment on those puffins. I really wanted to put them here. No. Youall need to see the whole photo essay.)

Art 

California nature scenes you've never seen before and will probably never see anywhere else: Pete Hampton grew up at a unique time in California's history--in between some unusually wet seasons that allowed unusual plant growth, and the urbanization that made it almost impossible to hope that that kind of landscapes will be seen again for a long time, no matter how wet future weather may be. Here's a selection of the paintings from the Lost Era Transcripts book, which is still available online as blog posts if you decide you want to follow the link and see all of them.

https://catsofruatha.blogspot.com/2025/09/samples-of-pete.html

Bonus Blog Post, Where to Find

Since I like videos but don't post them here (see below), and since the writer known as Priscilla Ann Bird, whom I've never met in real life, has a blog that's known for videos and especially for videos featuring guitars, I sent her a link-a-rama about Gate City's distinctive contribution to the history of American popular music. Thirty bands are mentioned, although not all of them appear in YouTube videos. PBird has decided to display the article as a series. If you're free to listen to music videos, expect a few classic ones in the main post and literally dozens more in the comment section. I don't think the Meow has ever had a day when nobody's comment on something was a video by Tom Petty, and most days Neil Young, Johnny Cash, John Renbourn, Mark Knopfler, the Beatles, and other guitar players and bands. Often people share different kinds of instruments for variation's sake, and one commenter frequently tries to bring the rest of us up to date with 1980s songs. So by the end of the day there will be a LOT more to this post than my reminiscences about bands that were playing between 1920 and 2010. 

Hmmm, decisions decisions...Each day's page at the Meow grows until everyone's bedtime. (When nightwatching I try to respect other people's bedtime.) That means it's complete and most interesting to read passively on the next day. Each day's conversation then moves to the next day's page. That means that if you want to join the conversation you have to come early and watch the page grow. 

The part with the Original Carter Family is here:

https://howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com/2025/09/memories-from-country-music-highway.html

The part in which Jimmie Rodgers spills over into the bands formed by my parents' generation is here:

https://howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com/2025/09/memories-of-country-music-highway-part-2.html

Charlie Kirk, Legacy of

First: 

Lens refuses to trace the image. I found it on the Mirror.

Kirk's widow's name is Erika. (Spelled differently from Erica-out-there-in-reader-land, which makes it easier for me to keep track.) She's 36 years old and plans to carry on his work. 

Her resume suggests that she has the talent, even if she chose her schools for their remote learning programs. A word of warning: Widowhood affects people strangely, especially in the first year. Every time they turn around they think of someone who ought to be there but isn't. This causes weeping and distraction, short-term memory loss, sleep disturbances, and a feeling of "brain fog." If Erika Kirk does the podcasts herself, expect them to be much better done next year than this year. 

Not that any effect on her podcasting is likely to matter to young men. She's pretty. A starlet of my generation called Bo Derek once observed that she was hired for her looks; talent wasn't necessary.

https://pjmedia.com/tim-o-brien/2025/09/13/who-is-erika-kirk-n4943659 

Now I have to say this. Conscience demands it. I spent some time on Substack this morning. As all Substackers soon learn, you visit the site to post your content for the week, but the site opens a social page similar to Twitter or Tsu. All the people you follow are there. It's a time sink. Anyway a lot of people were posting expressions of their feelings about Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska. A few were posting feelings about other murder victims who they felt weren't getting their fair share of attention. 

(1) Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and Husband

The lower house of the Minnesota state legislature are called Representatives, as in Congress, rather than Delegates. One of them was called Melissa Hortman. She had a husband, Mark. Their colleague in the upper house was State Senator John Hoffman; his wife's name was Yvette, and their daughter's name was Hope. In July an evildoer first shot Senator and Mrs. Hoffman, who were wounded but survived, and tried to shoot at their daughter, whom he missed. He then went after the Hortmans and shot both of them, too. Neither survived. 

Both legislators were Democrats and the shooter was known to hold some views that aligned with the Republican Party, but he reportedly insists that he was acting as a professional assassin, hired by a rival Democrat. 

Senator Hoffman is 60 years old. Representative Hortman was 55. 

(2) Downtown Suites Motel manager Chandra Nagamallaiah

Reportedly Mr. Nagamallaiah, who is described as about 50 years old, told a female employee to warn a customer not to use a broken washing machine at the motel. The customer felt insulted that a man had sent him a message by a woman, which apparently violated his cultural etiquette--so he took out a machete and chopped off Nagamallaiah's head. 

This was not a crime of passion. It was premeditated murder. It's possible to whip out a hunting knife that can stab someone fatally without thinking about it, but not a machete.

Why don't the commercial media say more about this? someone posted indignantly on X. Don't Brown lives matter? After reading the story I have an alternative hypothetical explanation. Few English-speaking people want to try to spell or pronounce the name "Nagamallaiah." If the man's name had been Rao or Patel...

We are an interesting species. Many Americans have a cultural taboo against a younger person giving orders to an older person. The taboo can be circumvented by something verging on old-style humble manners--"Please, Sir, Mr. Nagamallaiah wants me to say..."--but the older person retains a traditional right to speak sharply to the younger person, who then feels despised by both a senior and a subordinate and becomes depressed. This is a tradition we might want to reconsider. But neither the subordinate asked to relay the message, nor the person given the message, has any right to cut the message sender's head off. And the machete-swinger might have at least considered the possibility that Mr. Nagamallaiah saw nothing insulting in sending a message by someone who may have spoken English better than he did. 

These three murder victims weren't active on behalf of any larger cause at the time, and they were too old to make good "poster children." Along with the general decline of support for the censored media, and a resulting shortage of reporters sent out to investigate live stories, that would account for the lack of attention from the commercial media. 

Nevertheless, I regret their families' losses, and hope anyone who may be in a position to help will reach out to those families.

Health News 

Long, heavy reading: medical issues associated with "puberty blocker" drugs, especially Lupron.

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-dark-history-of-hormone-and-puberty

This is strictly a hypothesis, not a scientific study. It's being linked here because there ought to be a scientific study.

https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2025/09/15/featured-comment-36/

Politics, Practical 

Bill Maher's right. That happens sometimes.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/09/15/bill-maher-explains-exactly-whats-wrong-with-the-left-n4943724

Time for "conservatives," now defined as everyone but total left-wingnuts, to own our majority status--even if we don't define ourselves as "conservatives" and think some "conservatives" are, maybe not deplorable, but dreary? Stuffy? No more. Margolis put it well: time to let the left-wingnuts TRY to justify their authoritarian impulses, aka control-freaking, aka megalomania, aka THEY'RE NOT JUST "CRAZY" in the sense of offbeat or funny or "in love," THEY SERIOUSLY NEED HELP. And probably not mere counselling, either.

Virginia Election Stuff 

It's not news to those of you who really use the Internet...Time to explain something. This web site was originally meant to be printed out for reading by children who were not allowed to use the Internet on their own. Those people are no longer children. We could explain less and we could link to more adult content, but we don't, because some of them might, any day, have children of their own. So this web site's assumption will continue to be that we're presenting 99% child-safe--maybe boring, but never traumatic--content to people who are occasionally allowed to pull up a chair and watch something on a parent's computer. I have to write, not as if I were reading a bedtime story to a three-year-old, but as if I were chatting with a sister, friend, cousin, etc., in front of the children.

Anyway: I don't post videos here. This web site runs on the earliest, simplest version of Blogspot software so that it would be browser-friendly for people who were, in 2011, using computers from the 1990s. It won't do videos. I do enjoy reading other blogs that can plug YouTube and Rumble videos right into the pages, and often share the video links from those. 

But YouTube has recently discovered that, hello, Virginia is having an election in November. As a result, four out of five YouTube videos now open, for me, with reruns of the same, lame, 15-second ad from that blonde called Spamburger--er--Spanberger. She's presenting herself as a Spamburger. I don't know much about her but she is not originally from anywhere in cyberspace. Her use of ad videos and social media may set a world record for ineptitude. 

The ideas she seems to be trying to present aren't very exciting, either. Basically they consist of "Vote against Winsome Earle-Sears because, despite her credible record as Lieutenant-Governor, her service as a Marine (!), her character, and her personal charm, SHE DOESN'T HATE TRUMP AS MUCH AS I DO." If you think the ability to rise above hate if one does feel it is, and work with the President of the United States, is a desirable quality in a governor, and many Virginians do think that, then that's about the feeblest of all possible ad messages.

Spanberger does have a face and a political record but she's not using the Internet to attract people to either of those things. Instead of showing us her face she's showing us the Lieutenant-Governor's face, using the most unflattering photos she can find. What those photos show is that (1) naturally curly hair frizzes up and looks messy in damp weather, which is not news to many people if any, and (2) for her age, Winsome Earle-Sears is looking good. Seriously? Eyeroll and giggle.

So then, if you're determined to be fair because in Virginia we try to be fair, you might go to Spanberger's X profile page and ask her and her social media people what she positively stands for. I did that one night, when I was being the nightwatchman and was too sleepy to do serious research or online socializing. And seriously, the content of Spanberger's X profile consisted of claims that the rest of a crowd in which Spanberger was photographed were not racists. 

The question had arisen because Spanberger had voted in favor of admitting boys who thought they might be "transitioning" to girls' locker rooms in high school sports. (Hello? At a girls' sports event, a boy who just wanted to change clothes and take a shower would have soooo much more room to do that in the boys' room.) So apparently it was not Spanberger, but a friend of hers, who thought of the following really clever campaign sign (/ sarcasm): "HEY WINSOME, IF TRANSWOMEN CAN'T USE YOUR BATHROOM, BLACK PEOPLE CAN'T USE MY WATER FOUNTAIN." 

Say what?

Hey Abigail! (Spanberger's ads do admit that her given name is Abigail.) You and your ghostface friends don't need to use my water fountain, either. Especially not the ones I'm helping to pay for in the Governor's Mansion. 

I'm writing this with malice toward none and charity toward all. If anybody out there does honestly support Spanberger, if her campaign staff aren't just paid workers who are putting together this campaign as sabotage, you need to get her off YouTube and put whatever solid, positive content she has onto social media, now. You could start with making sure her X profile conforms to the stereotype in the ancient joke, "If people are from Virginia they'll tell you which town." 

Seriously. This woman had an X profile that didn't even celebrate her town!

Fortunately I've seen reasons to like and respect our Lieutenant-Governor anyway. One of which is that she understands that there's no valid reason why a teen athlete who looks like a boy would want to use the girls' locker room.

Book Review: Back to Titanic

Title: Back to Titanic

Author: I.D. Johnson

Date: 2025

Quote: "You couldn't even get near the pool if you weren't a first-class passenger."

Millie's parents were Titanic movie buffs. They even named their children after passengers on the ship, hubristically pronounced "unsinkable," that sank in 1912. At least they recorded Millie's full first name as Millicent rather than the actual passenger's name, Millvina. Now Millie's mother has saved up enough money to take a cruise on a replica ship built for reenactors, with pictures of the original Titanic and the people who were on it in 1912. Fortunately they're first-class passengers who can use the pool.

Fortunately? Millie slips, takes a blow on the head, and seems to wake up on the original Titanic. She had just noticed a cute guy on the replica ship. Someone who looks like him is on the original ship. Luckily for Millie, his sister happens to be about her size--though in 1912 a fashionable lady's clothes did not fit her actual waist or feet. All fashion victims wanted their waist and feet to look smaller than they were and, to that end, they stuffed themselves into corsets and shoes as small as they could bear, often small enough to damage the body. Millie keeps most of her complaining to herself and tries to fit in by doing nice things for the people who notice her, so that they notice how nice she is rather than what a misfit she is--a nice trick for those who can make it work for them. 

The cute guy, Will, is travelling with his brother and sister. The pool on the Titanic was open to men only or to women only at different hours. When Millie turns up during the men's time, correctly giving her room number on the replica ship, which just happens to be Will's sister's room number, everyone else wants to guess that she's a third-class passenger trying to seduce a first-class passenger for money; Will says she's an old school friend and leads her to rest on the sofa beside his sister's bed. His siblings aren't as kindhearted (or as susceptible to Millie's personal charm) as Will is, but they play along with his game out of loyalty. 

Will and Millie decide that Millie's been sent back in time in order to help more passengers survive by warning them sooner and filling the lifeboats more evenly. So they do. They work together until most of the ship is under water. Then Millie slips down into the cold, cold sea...where, in a novel of 1912, because she and Will have not waited for marriage, she'd drown. (Yes. The sex scenes aren't detailed but it's made clear that they're doing what makes babies when they know they can't even plan on marriage.)

In some lines of romantic fiction today, Millie would have been having a vivid fantasy about the cute guy on the replica ship. Though the story that's been her fantasy takes up most of this volume, in a sequel they'll get acquainted while both are conscious, and fall in love...right? 

Not so fast. This is a self-published Kindle romance of 2025. There are other possibilities. For one thing the next title in what's promised to be a series is Back to Gettysburg, though the author doesn't say whether either Will or Millie will go there. You just have to read and find out.

Petfinder Post: Sunday Was "Hug Your Hound" Day

"Hug Your Hound Day" is one of those Internet-generated holidays that few people actually observe, or know exists. It was not made to order for Petfinder photo contests. But it could have been.

Several breeds of dogs are classified as hounds. A few hundred years ago, they were the "designer dogs" bred to hunt different kinds of game. Hence the size range from the little sniffers that are now called Bloodhounds (though "bloodhound" originally meant any kind of hound that hunted by scent, and used to be used in reference to big dogs) to deer-sized, originally deer-hunting, greyhounds. This photo contest will look first for lovable, low-maintenance coon hounds.

Coon hounds are largish dogs with short hair that needs relatively little grooming. As a breed they're hardy, not prone to diseases, content to hang out together (traditionally under porches) until a human calls one or all of them to go somewhere. They can become aggressive if encouraged in that direction, but are normally friendly, though loud, and good with children. The hounds people in my part of the world used to keep, mostly as watchdogs, learned to be protective of cats and chickens and even ducks. In their doggy way they can be intelligent. They are less popular in suburbs than in the country because it can be hard to convince them that they weren't hired to sing. Some of them can "sing along" with train whistles and fire sirens, not to mention music on the radio--sometimes even on key.

But first, the cats:

Zipcode 10101: Tina from NYC 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/tina-71466877/ny/long-island-city/second-chance-rescue-ny949/

Tina has her own ideas about where and how she wants to live. She was a store cat, but when her humans brought in another cat Tina quit her store job and became an alley cat. If you can keep only one animal, she might consider being the one for you. 

Zipcode 20202: Ayra from Kuwait by way of Merrifield 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/ayra-kuwait-77306288/va/merrifield/4paws-rescue-team-va260/

She really was born in Kuwait. She was tested for diseases and found healthy when she came to the United States. Ayra is described as very friendly with humans, one of those cats who will sleep right on top of you if they're allowed in the bedroom. How does she get along with other cats? Well, she was placed in the shelter with former cat companions. They say nothing about these cats having bonded or needing to be adopted together. Draw your own conclusions. Ayra is thought to be three years old and is still bouncy-pouncy; she likes to chase toys or light beams.

Zipcode 30303: Pixel from Fayetteville 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/pixel-adopt-with-sundance-78136747/ga/fayetteville/fayette-humane-society-ga83/

This innocent kitten has fallen into the hands of the Humane Pet Genocide Society. She is available for adoption with a sibling they call Sundance. Not much is known about them yet. They're kittens, they purr, they play, they snuggle, they're unbearably cute, they'll grow bigger and perhaps less cute. 

Alternate Zipcode 30303: Calypso from Lilburn 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/calypso-76403854/ga/lilburn/fairy-tails-rescue-organization-ga1121/

Apparently abandoned with, probably because she had, five kittens, Calypso let herself be taken in by a foster family. She is about ready to wean the kittens. You don't have to adopt all of them, but there won't be any more. Nursing kittens helps mother cats recover a slim figure; she's healthy and has been fed.

Zipcode 10101: May from Bulgaria by way of Morristown 

Her web page:https://www.petfinder.com/dog/may-77919097/nj/morristown/friends-of-sochi-dogs-nj859/

Though she shows the conformation of a mix of coon hound and beagle, May is actually a European mix of who knows what. She is not a hunting or guard dog. She doesn't chase small animals. She's house trained and likes to walk or ride with her humans, but she's cautious around new people. She weighs 44 pounds. They recommend her to a family that have a good-sized fenced yard and another dog. May is not friendly with cats. 

Zipcode 20202: Edison from Centreville 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/edison-57691789/va/centreville/deepwood-animal-rescue-fund-va883/

Do not be deceived. Though his coon hound conformation gives him the look of a cute little beagle pup, Edison is a large dog, on the older side, somewhat set in his ways. He's not for everyone. He has lived with some other dogs, but he's picky about his friends. They're not cats. He would like to bound and bark and bay and let everyone know that he owns a big fenced yard, if not a farm. Though more inclined to bark than to bite, he's a watchdog who will make sure you hear about anyone approaching the house. He likes hanging out and walking with humans, even children. 

Zipcode 30303: Deputy from Gillsville 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/deputy-74159060/ga/gillsville/dirt-road-doggies-rescue-inc-ga868/

He was born feral. His mother was found when she'd just given birth to fourteen puppies. Even after that she was wild and tough enough not to be caught. Most of the pups apparently didn't survive. The five who survived were trapped with food bait. Deputy, the one in the foreground of this picture, was one of the wariest and hardest to tame; he still is one of the last two to be adopted. He is still very shy of new people. He needs to be adopted by someone who has some experience with very cautious dogs.

Well, they don't let a lot of good hounds go into shelters in Georgia. Deputy is not yet a pet but the shelter staff think he will be, for the right person.

Book Review: Puppy Peril

Title: Puppy Peril 

Author: Hazel Smith

Date: 2025

Quote: "Monty...was already past her knees, and, at the rate he was growing, he'd outweigh her soon."

Maid Ivy, who was brought up by grandparents who ran a cleaning service and just loves to keep everything clean, has adopted the Great Dane who will be her companion in later adventures. She's been hired by the La Fontaine Hotel, where the first published book in her series took place, but has yet to start work there. To fill the days between being hired and going to work, she volunteers to clean a local animal shelter. She becomes acquainted with lots of quirky, likable older people. She also finds a dead body on the street...and evidence of a dognapping operation. Is it possible that the two things are connected?

Partial spoiler: Monty will lead Ivy and us readers into the foul core of the dognapper's den, the hidden side animal rescuers can have. And my suspension of disbelief was jiggled. When people Go Wrong, they can of course go altogether wrong. Someone who is humane toward mongrels, Chihuahuas, and Great Danes can run a horrible puppy mill breeding stolen pit bulls and selling them to people who want to sell tickets to dogfights. But isn't it more common in real life that people who Go Wrong make small compromises, that a person who wants to support a shelter for other kinds of dogs might be breeding stray pit bulls for resale and telling perself that at least the dogs are humanely treated while they're in per care--and that individuals who take responsibility for a lot of animals are most likely to disappoint the animals because money or illness prevents their doing what they need to do? Well...the puppy mill person in this book is a unique character. Such people exist in the real world but they are, mercifully, unusual.

I might have been happier with a different plot but I enjoyed spending a few more hours with Monty and Ivy. So, if you like a mystery where one murder can be solved by observation without waiting for it to become a series, where the pretty girl is more interested in work than in sex, where the dog is part of the plot without having any supernatural powers, will you. 

Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Liponesco

This week's butterfly, Graphium liponesco, is sometimes called the Long-Tailed Striped Swordtail. 

Museum specimen from https://www.gbif.org/species/5141189

Graphium liponesco is not easy to find or photograph, but neither is it impossible. The difficulty is being sure that a photograph really does show G. liponesco. Other species have almost identical wings. Dissecting the body to establish a clear species identity spoils the look of the picture.

The butterflies are similar to Graphium policenes and G. policenoides in most ways. Some sources list both liponesco and policenoides as subspecies of policenes, which accounts to some extent for the scarcity of useful information about liponesco online. Graphium liponesco is almost identical to biokoensis; the easiest way to tell them apart is, according to Oskar Brattstrom, where they are. Graphium liponesco are somewhat rare. They live in the sub-Saharan forest and tend to avoid humans. Only liponesco are found west of the Niger river, and only biokoensis east of it. Experts say, after cutting up dead butterflies, that there are consistent, significant differences in the body in addition to what might not always be a clear, consistent variation in the stripes.

https://bicyclus.se/EPUB/Nigerian_Butterflies-Papilionidae-1_0.pdf

In fact, according to some sources, there is another species with almost identical wings, Graphium bouyeri, that can "easily" be distinguished from G. liponesco when they are dissected. Most humans probably prefer not to know.

https://treatment.plazi.org/GgServer/html/EF5E87B8FF8EFFA4FF2F31DABBE219DC

The story of how the species identities of Graphium policenes, G. policenoides, and G. liponesco were sorted out to the present level of understanding is told in this paper:

https://abdb-africa.org/library/bibliography/2190.pdf

More of the currently available data about this group of species is found in this reference paper; phoros of G. liponesco start on page 30:

https://metamorphosis.org.za/articlesPDF/1040/009%20Genus%20Graphium%20Scopoli.pdf 

Book Report: Some Assembly Required

Required Reading for All Pro-Lifers

Book Title: Some Assembly Required

Author: Anne and Sam Lamott

Publisher: Penguin / Riverhead

Date: 2012

ISBN: 978-1-59448-841-2

Length: 272 pages

Quote: "The best thing--besides how unbelievably perfect Jax is, not to mention alive--is to watch Sam be a father."

Anne Lamott's first nonfiction book was Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. A little earlier than anyone expected, the son whose infancy was described in that book was able to collaborate with Lamott on Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son. (On the inside back cover, dreadlocked blonde Anne Lamott tries to look as grandmotherly as possible.)

If you're a hardcore conservative fundamentalist type of Christian, you might say that "this," meaning premature grandmotherhood, is what Anne Lamott's liberal (in both senses--ecumenical theology and left-wing politics) approach to Christianity leads to.

If you're any kind of Christian, however, you'll have to love the way Lamott fights the urge to nag and scold her grandson's parents, forces herself to treat them as adults, and focusses on loving her grandson. And her church. And other religious people with whom she spends time during baby Jax's first year (which includes a tour in India). And Jesus.

What's not to love? As in Operating Instructions, this is an intimate, woman-to-woman book about a baby. It's hard to imagine a whole book about a baby that would not be full of moist and smelly medical details. Both of Anne Lamott's baby books bounce easily up and down, like mountain goats, from the spiritual heights ("explaining the Nicene Creed") to the cerebral ("If you try to protect [children] from hurt, and always rush to their side...they won't learn about life") to the earthy ("Is dung an element?"), and back, often within a sentence: "When I was teaching Sunday school, Jax...emerged...having opened up a little container of baby-junk-food sweet-potato bits...he had so much drool on his hands that they were sticking to him." This is Lamott's trademark, the style of writing that's put her among the bestselling Christian writers in the English-speaking world. There are those who prefer a more abstract, less earthy sort of Christian book.

However, what I've said about Lamott's other memoirs, in general, applies to this one. If you want to do something "pro-life," other than bringing up your own children, Anne Lamott can show you how it's done. No harangues. No guilt trips. Just gratitude that Jesus lives in the hearts of people who, approximately twenty years ago, promised a mixed-up young woman that they'd help her raise a child who had been produced by her sleeping with someone else's husband in exchange for drugs. And they did. And she did. And she became rich and famous by writing about it and now has money to give back to those who slipped their change into her pockets at church when she was young and poor.

I had to post something about this book here. Should have done it sooner, in fact, because Some Assembly Required was one of the first books on this site's official Amazon Wish List. Some dear, kind privacy fanatic out there made it possible for me to enjoy this book and tell youall about it. Thanks to you. Thanks to Anne and Sam Lamott, too.

Web Log for 9.12-13.25

Animals 

Somewhere someone likes to look at bears. Here are some very clear photos of bears.

https://roadsendnaturalist.com/2025/09/08/season-of-the-bears/

Books 

Jamie Wilson's list of nice books to give girls, for back-to-school or birthdays or Christmas or whatever, is a good list. Just one caveat: If a girl is really into books, it can probably be assumed that she's read all the ones that are age-appropriate, or even one age-group-bracket ahead of her. This web site recommends that gift shoppers talk to their nieces and granddaughters and find out what they already have before buying them yet another...Marie Curie and Helen Keller were admirable women but, in grade five or six, I remember feeling tired of reading about them.

https://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/09/06/the-war-on-girls-saving-our-daughters-from-sparkly-vampires-and-girlboss-lies-n4943379

Charlie Kirk 

Glenn Beck says he should be called a civil rights leader. Has a nice ring, doesn't it? 

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/09/12/glenn-beck-wants-us-to-stop-calling-charlie-kirk-a-conservative-activist-heres-why-n4943643

I think this may explain why, although an Independent, I've been leaning to the R side lately. I don't know that Jasmine Crockett, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, or any of their "squad" need to be in Congress. I know that it's very hard for any human being to respect any group that lets itself be represented by David Hogg. But "laughing hysterically and celebrating" is not what I'd be likely to do if they died. I'd think more about how young they were, and the possibility that their heads might have straightened out if they'd lived another thirty years. The D glee, the tweets like "Can we do Ben Shapiro next?", just aren't relatable. 

Somewhere that little braying jackass has a mother who thinks young Devon is pretty, despite that unfortunate hair. If somebody hit Devon in the teeth with something their possum refused to eat that had once been a tomato, that would be funny. If Devon choked on the foul residue of the tomato and died, I'd feel sorry for her mother. And that is why, although I used to like and fit in with Ds my age, I just don't feel that I fit in with that party any more. Ds my age are human beings, mostly decent ones I've always thought. Today's young crop of Ds appear to be ghouls.

No glee from, e.g., Bernie Sanders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlIvH6ozvv4

MAHA 

Should Trump have...? I'm feeling ambivalent here. On the one hand, Scott Pinsker is right, Trump is a freaking savant, even a savant freak. He can't be Ronald Reagan, and he knows it. He can be Donald Trump, loud, tacky, orange, and able to count and count on the reactions he'll get from people who think he's beaten Bill Clinton's record of tackiness. What we've been seeing all year is that if Trump says a thing, a predictable number of people will say "Oh no you don't, you can't, that's too tacky," and if the number is high enough Trump will let them have that point while quietly scoring some other point on some other topic. What some of his supporters seem to find surprising is that a lot of things they really wanted, things I wouldn't mind seeing happen, are in that category of things Trump never actually expected to make happen. "Tariffs will replace all income tax"? It might be nice, but did anyone seriously believe that Trump seriously meant that as more than a throwaway line? Anyway, if he says "Meh, maybe Gates is right, maybe we should mandate polio vaccines," that instantly pushes some people to support Secretary Kennedy and all rightminded people: If a vaccine is effective, it never needs to be mandated. 

On the other hand, mandating polio vaccines is just wrong. It pushes people who might need the vaccine to reject it, pushes people who've had it to blame it for everything else that goes wrong with the rest of their lives. ("And then I fell out of the boat and a shark bit off my leg, and it's aaallll because I had that horrible polio vaccine thirty years ago!") It's one thing for Trump to use psychology to get out of those awkward campaign promises about slashing the federal budget and cutting taxes, which are points on which reasonable minds differ. It's another thing for anybody, even Trump, to uphold arguments that are obviously not based in reality; e.g., that people who don't want to be vaccinated present any danger to people who have been vaccinated if the vaccine is at al effective. 

And Gates's transhumanism is not something either Christians or Humanists need even to pretend to take seriously.

https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2025/09/06/can-president-trump-save-maha-from-itself-n4943405

Math 

This X-post may help somebody, somewhere...

https://x.com/5PriscillaKing/status/1964592234382373051

Like most people my age, I learned in primary school to write down two-digit numbers, one above the other, and add up the ones column, carry any multiples of ten to the tens column, add up the tens, carry any multiples of 100 to the hundreds column, etc. That is an efficient and reliable way to do addition, subtraction, and multiplication when you have a pencil and paper in hand. It's the way most parents were taught, and the way many objected bitterly to "Common Core" math not being taught.

Sometimes you don't have a pencil and paper. These days, if you are smart, you don't have a spyphone (aka smartphone, aka stupidphone) either; if you own one, it lives at the back of a drawer until YOU want to make a call, at which time the battery is probably dead, but at least all the evildoers know about you is that you own socks or silverware or whatever. Anyway it would have "updated" since the last time you had used the calculator so you wouldn't know how to unlock the calculator function. So you would still need a pencil and paper, unless the numbers are small enough (two or three two-or-three-digit numbers) that you can keep track of them in your head.

So in grade four, when Mr. Ed. sent home a note saying I had to learn the multiplication tables (it had been optional in the two preceding years), and Mother said "We're going to the swimming pool. You can come along when you've learned the multiplication table," and Dad stayed around to make sure I didn't get any creative ideas for revenge, Dad explained how to add or multiply large messy numbers without the pencil and paper. 

You read the numbers the opposite way than you learned in New Math, the way you might have learned in Common Core. Begin at the left side. Round to the nearest multiple of ten for each number.

49 is 50 minus 1.

29 is 30 minus 1.

You can remember 80. Now subtract the two 1's, and there you are with the correct answer: 78.

You can do this with larger numbers, up to a point. Most people will lose track of the numbers if there are more than nine numerals altogether. Why?  Because seven, plus or minus two, is the number of items a normal person can retain in short-term memory. This is also why, if the baby cries or the computer beeps, you'll probably forget the whole equation.

Anyway, to use large numbers, say the dates (CE) when official historians say the two main "modern" English-speaking nations were organized:

1066 is 1000 plus 66

1776 is 1700 plus 76

You can remember 2700. 

66 is 60 plus 6

76 is 70 plus 6

You can remember 130. Add that to 2700.

6 plus 6 is 12

You can remember 12. Add that to 2830 and get 2842.

This is tricky, especially if you are a typical multitasking responsible woman at home where the 5 to 9 items in your short-term memory already include the clock, the oven, the children, the computer, the animals, and that before you started listening supportively to someone nattering on about numbers you were going to remind that person to do an errand tomorrow, and consequently you are likely to have forgotten the 2830. Women may be carriers of the math gene but it seems to be fully expressed only in men, who are biologically disposable so they're given brains with room for that kind of thing. But IF the children are grown up and gone and the animals are doing their own thing outdoors, women seem to add 1066 and 1776 about as efficiently as men do. 

Every home should maintain a good stock of pencils and paper, so that people don't have to rely on having enough uninterrupted time to add up numbers in their heads. Very few people can keep track of large numbers, though you might try, just for fun, adding up things like a grocery shopping list, two numbers at a time...$6 for that $5 package of meat, $6 for that $1 dozen eggs and they're not even from organically raised hens, $6 for that $2 box of Cheerios...Older people sometimes balk at doing this because we find it so annoying. I find it useful to feel the annoyance and get over it before I go into the store and am further annoyed by having to put things back or go over budget at the actual counter, but your mileage may vary.

Still, this trick does make it easy to figure out how much cash to take into the store, and suchlike.

Poetry 

Fans of Elizabeth Barrette, who blogs as Ysabetwordsmith on Live Journal and Dreamwidth, know that she does a monthly Poetry Fishbowl Day in which people get to propose topics and forms and she writes poems while they wait, online. People can buy these poems and have them posted online, or she will keep them and try selling them to magazines. Many of them are short stories in free verse form, priced not by the word but by the (short) line. That is...

she

doesn't

charge

for 

one-or-

two-word

lines 

but does break up sentences

into phrases,

in picture book style.

This can have the effect

of making a story easier

for people with some disabilities

to read.

Many of these poems and stories celebrate human diversity, talents, and the superpower of working through or around disabilities. Most months, a Poetry Fishbowl Day leaves EB with poems to market to magazines. This month, she celebrated selling them all. She still has several poems to sell, some forming serial stories about characters and plot lines that become readers' favorites. Her friendly community of supervillains seems to be the most popular overall. I liked the "Monster House." Then of course there are the more traditional poems. There's a series, of which only a few poems have been published so far, of poems about our fifty States in which Virginia is finally represented by the Point rather than the Hump! If you like quirky, accessible poetry, you can buy some here:

https://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/6768661.html

Politics, Philosophy of 

Snarky funny stories of what happens when people try to legislate nice ideas that aren't covered in the Bible or the Constitution:

https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2025/09/12/red-tape-and-unintended-consequences/

Weird, News of the 

Worthy of Chuck Shepherd's column: In Stillwater, Minnesota, a man received a ticket for driving a car with a loud muffler. The car is all electric. It has no muffler.

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2025/09/howdya-get-outta-this-ticket.html

Writing 

As regular readers know, Stephen King is not discernibly related to me, but any honest writer has to admit a certain admiration of his work. Even if you believe that God does not want us to read about zombie cats and demon-possessed cars and teenaged misfits with the power to destroy the school, who but Big Steve has the almost equally magical power to make people buy millions of copies of novels a thousand pages long? 

Sometimes less is more.

This just may be the best, and the most challenging, thing Stephen King ever wrote:

https://x.com/StephenKing/status/1966484038648021264

After Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk was murdered on Wednesday. 

I read this news item and thought "I've heard that name before," but it didn't mean anything in particular to me. That shows what a rut we middle-aged people in cyberspace can get into. I follow as many of the "conservative" blogs, and of the really "liberal" (as opposed to hate-filled left-wingnut) blogs, as possible; somehow the ones with forums that appeal to me seem to appeal to people who are currently over age 50. We share and discuss content from Joe Rogan, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Naomi Wolf; we don't keep up with the younger news bloggers. I think Russell Brand is the youngest "conservative" I've seen linked. And that gives me a lot to read and listen to, and meanwhile people like Charlie Kirk, Lara Logan, Anna Paulina Luna, Saurabh Sharma, Michael Knowles, well, they're out there somewhere. Older "conservatives," or moderates or classical liberals who are currently labelled "conservative"? It might be interesting to Google "conservative speakers under age 40" and see how many you've ever read or listened to. Time has its way of creeping up on us. We're not in the habit of thinking how long it's been since we were under age 40.

So I've learned about this man only last week. He was thirty-one, not much older than some of The Nephews (yikes!). He left behind a picture-perfect nuclear family, wife with lovely long blonde hair, two children barely old enough to talk; very reminiscent of President Kennedy's family. People in the commercial media who had met him remember him as the voice for free speech and open discussion. "A Christian," I'm told he was, who wanted to debate people and win on facts alone. His last public speech (on Fox News) and X-post were about the Ukrainian girl who was murdered in North Carolina: "It is 100% necessary to politicize the murder of Iryna Zarutska." In other recent speeches he spoke against Sharia law, and accused women who want to wait long enough to be sure they're getting husbands with fatherly characters of "choosing careerism, consumerism, and loneliness." That's not a very insightful summary of what they're choosing but it probably is an accurate summary of what Kirk was rejecting by marrying young. A nice, wholesome, Young Republican.

Conservatives are rumbling, even saber-rattling, across the land. Suddenly two young people most of us didn't know, had never made time to listen to, have become everyone's favorite niece and nephew simply because they were murdered. I have to wonder how some Rs' real nieces and nephews feel about that. 

I think we who didn't know either Kirk or Zarutska will probably have cause to miss them. There are three obvious ways to spin the Zarutska murder story. 

The one that appeals to me casts Zarutska as a poster girl for women's long denied civil rights. Andrew Tate, I can't believe that old blowhard is still being allowed to speak, much less that anyone's listening, blatted, "What was that GIRL doing OUT ALONE AFTER DARK?" He doesn't think women should have jobs, much less the right to commute to and from their jobs in peace. I think Tate's argument, that men are inherently violence-prone so women should be cowering indoors, not daring to earn our own room and board, just starving in a ladylike way if we can't live on what our male relatives make I suppose, is actually a very good argument for not allowing men to be on the streets without responsible female supervision. As in, not merely a sympathetic friend or relative, but an armed police officer. If anyone needs to be locked up, it's the violence-prone ones, not the potential victims. Unfortunately all women have been trained to see all men as potential assailants, no matter how much love and trust we feel for the ones we know personally. The brother you love and trust may be someone else's mugger or murderer. So if we listen to Tate, all the men in America need to be either working on their family farms, or working in labor camps with armed guards in towers along the razor-wire fences, or in institutions. Women have the right to use the public streets. Women do better in the skilled professions and are far less likely to commit violent crimes. Women would miss being able to learn from male co-workers or flirt with men in clubs or hear men preach in church, but if that is freedom's price, we might not mind.

The one that clearly appealed to Fox as being even more sensational casts Zarutska as a poster girl for White victims of Black violent criminals. If you saw the train's surveillance video you know how that works out in real life. Three Black men were in that end of that railcar. The smaller one was cringing against the wall. The older one was staring into space, not letting himself see, The big one clearly scared the other two men as much as he did the surviving woman. Most White Americans already see little difference when they look at men like those three. A Black man is a Black man is a Black man. So the two nonviolent Black men in that railcar have to go through life not knowing whether to be more afraid of Black men like that violent one, or of White people who see no difference between them and him. No wonder Black men have such high rates of hypertension and early death. This web site apologizes in advance to all law-abiding Black men.

Then there's the one Charlie Kirk apparently had in mind, which was simply that after a certain number of violent offenses an offender should be considered incorrigible and locked up for life. How reasonable. How fair. How ethical. How...boring? Was that why he was murdered? Some other young man found his ideas boring? Nothing radical or polarizing or revolutionary?

Those who think we need no more radical, polarizing, revolutionary blather added to the existing supply are likely to miss Charlie Kirk. He seemed the type of young man who could, calmly and politely, explain where, how, and why Fox had got his message wrong. 

I think I may have to give up reading one of the North Carolina blogs I've been following. People who may need to ride a train in Charlotte understandably have very intense feelings about the fact that no armed railcops burst into the railcar before Zarutska was dead. Some people at that blog seem to have intense feelings about life in general, at best. They seem to forget that in recent years people who still make noises like a "White Supremacist" are likely to be paid informers.

The "Trump Train" consists of a mad mixture of right-wingers, moderate Rs, fiscal conservatives, classical liberals, Independents, true Greens, sober Libertarians, conservative Ds, and people who had no politics before concerns about their or their relatives' health drove them to the Children's Health Defense movement, who are now lumped together as "conservatives." Everyone but total left-wingnuts now seems to be classified as a "conservative," which of course gave the Trump campaign a big boost. Being a good "liberal" in the sense of enjoying the mood of these diverse elements all stewing together, I've stuck to reminding people that we "conservatives" do not need to act like the idiotic stereotype the clueless Left would like to stick to us, that one Civil War was more than either Virginia or North Carolina ever needed...

...That old people don't make the best martyrs for a movement. As mentioned in the introduction to a short story I posted here some years ago, at 

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/short-story-influencers.html ,

If anything is ever going to stack up against financial interests on the scales of public opinion, it's the untimely death of a promising young person. The violent death of an older person can also be effective, but nothing else hits hoi polloi as hard as the loss of someone who was young and fresh and promising, all her (or his) road before her (or him). Like Iryna Zarutska. 

Charlie Kirk's X profile does not show evidence of much original thought, but it shows clear thinking. He was in favor of free speech and objective debate and fair fighting. He also understood the value of a martyr to a movement. Iryna Zarutska doesn't seem to have stood for anything in particular; she was just a half-grown pizza flipper. She was not a world-class Beauty; her face showed imperfect symmetry, her bleached hair didn't make her look credible as a blonde, and she was letting the black roots of her hair show at an uneven parting; but she was young-and-therefore-pretty, with good Slavic cheekbones and big brown eyes. Young men would have stopped to look at her. Kirk wanted to make her famous as a martyr for some movement related to commuter safety. 

And then he, too, became a martyr for freedom of speech and objective debate AND FAIR FIGHTING. I want my saber-rattling e-friends to let that sink in. I don't want to hang around there nagging at them. I want them to think about him and fight for their cause "the way Charlie Kirk would've done," with reasoned arguments and courteous manners. 

Something that came to mind recently was a clip from Secretary Kennedy's testimony in the Senate. He was speaking with Senator  Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren. She was clearly treating him as an equal; at one point she called him "Senator." But then she...I'm not sure that "lost it" is the phrase. She was in control of her manners but she lost control of her image. Kennedy has a major speech impairment. Warren has none. She wasn't exactly yelling, she wasn't standing up and leaning across the table, she wasn't even shaking a fist or pointing a finger, but she was...spewing out words. She spoke fast and furiously while he was trying to force words out. It was a painful scene to watch. 

I don't know that Charlie Kirk would instinctively have had better skills than that. I think--hope--he had. I think it was an instructive moment for all us "conservatives" who think it's time for a "turning point" in the way people understand the word "progress." We want to make progress back to the American idea that all people are created equal, with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which people may or may not define as wealth. (According to legend, Thomas Jefferson originally wanted to say "wealth," but Benjamin Franklin reminded him that the radical Christians in Pennsylvania weren't pursuing wealth, primarily, so our Declaration of Independence says "happiness.") 

That means nobody has the power to arbitrate equal outcomes; people have to take the natural consequences of their actions. It means nobody is so superior to anyone else as to be a "gatekeeper" to what other people are allowed to read or write or think or say. It means most people have a right to be armed, and are likely to be armed, so it's good to avoid fights even if you think you could win a fair fight with the other person. It means debates need to be won on facts, not on extraneous factors like the ability to talk faster than another person. It means people are innocent until proven guilty--although the man who murdered Iryna Zarutska had been proven guilty fourteen times and released from prison on a technicality that was probably considered only out of a misguided sense of race loyalty. 

Metaphors of violence may be built into our language, into most human languages. We are keyboard warriors. Right. We're fighting for reforms. Right. We want to kill bad bills. Right. We should avoid throwing those metaphors around in ways that suggest any interest in physical violence. 

There is a movement, originating in corporate trade associations whose representatives have tried to recruit "influencers" and politicians, aimed at "destroying" Robert Kennedy. Well, anyone who even looks sidewise at the Irish Chieftain of Glyphosate Awareness is also likely to meet my Inner Mama Bear. Someone in Washington annoyed me enough to get a message recommending that the person leave Kennedy alone or I'd call out something less than admirable that the person has done. I think that's within the ethical boundaries for us who have recently, and to our surprise, been designated as "conservatives." We can embarrass people, if we have some good "dirt" on them. 

But with Charlie Kirk as poster boy, those of us trying to preserve freedom of speech should feel reminded to keep it polite, keep it clean, keep it nonviolent, leave people's parents and children out of any disagreements, and generally "fight" like gentlemen, or -women. Use language that won't embarrass those of us who live with young children, or the children. Never stop saying, "This is wrong. This won't work. This didn't serve people who tried it very well in some other time and place, and it's likely to be even worse for us." Try not to start saying "You're an idiot. You're a traitor. You're an evil person." 

Left-wingnuts were saying horrible things about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Let's assume that they were in emotional denial that the murder was real. "Next time can we do [an older "conservative" writer?" Let's just say, not if I catch you, you can't. 

We can do better than this. We're right. Some prog-trog posted something that looked like a statistical argument on X in support of a specious argument. Something about the statistics didn't look right to me. Hello? This is cyberspace. I Googled. Trog's statistics didn't look right because they were blatantly bogus. I quoted accurate statistics at him. I think the trog's running yet. 

Go and do likewise, Gentle Readers. Be best. In memory of Charlie Kirk.

14 Words on Love

(Friday morning's post, sneaking in late.) Some people really could make a micro-poem out of "fourteen words about love." It's worth visiting the other links at Poets & Storytellers United. Warning: some of our poets love to write about Romantic Love.

Whereas:

Aunts write about the love of God

and love of our nieces and nephews.

Lest what comes to mind seem odd

like crumpled paper tossed out as refuse,

allow this space where I may iterate:

Dsnake1's fourteen words, I think, are great.

I think what I obtain, counting words,

is like wheat pastry: for the birds.

I didn't say it's not fun; 'tis.

My poor muse cannot make it fizz.

Web Log for 9.11.25

About today's Big News Story...I can't claim to have been even a fan of Charlie Kirk's, and I'm not going to try. I hear videos (don't even try to watch them) that happen to be shared by friends who want to discuss them. His weren't the ones. He was by all reports a decent man. He died far too young. Thoughts, prayers, and respect go out to those who knew him. These links are for people for whom this is a work day, though we respect those who are mourning.

I'll say this, though. Though Mrs. Kirk has long blonde hair, the photos of the family remind me strangely of the Kennedy family in 1961.

Animals 

Something to look for when doing tourist duty in North Carolina. Elk would be less likely to be seen on the Tennessee side, but you never know. The Tennessee side of the border is a little less "touristy," I think, a little more "real."

Photo ganked from a very pleasant blog to follow--lots of photos, jokes, and music videos: 

https://curiousasacathy.com/peacefully-sitting/

Economy, Global Indicators of 

All I said was, when a photo of Stacey Dash popped up on X (finally, I've only followed her for I think four years since I last saw anything from her there), that some people look good with curls. I think Dash does. Within hours two cute girls from India, who might be sisters, who probably shouldn't be using the Internet without parental supervision, were DM'ing me for help publishing photos of themselves as models. Either they have a scam going and send these things to everyone in the US they find, or there's a shortage of modelling opportunities in India for cute girls with long curly hair. 

Men's Issues 

Is hating men considered cute and trendy these days? Really hating men, as distinct from wisecracking about them? It may be...in the social circles of women who've been harmed by men. Biology does not predispose women to homicidal competition for competition's sake--that's a male thing--but we do have the same capacity for vindictiveness that men have, and easy access to SSRI drugs makes it easy for some women to act on their vindictive thoughts. 

We must not blame women as a group (although we can blame individuals who commit violent crimes). We must accept that women have valid reasons to be angry, and work on helping women address those reasons rather than directing their anger toward innocent people who seem like safer targets. 

I was what (a biologist describing the way some male insects bite into the females' shells while mating, quoted by May Berenbaum) called "a minimally damaged female." My father was strict, rigid, oldfashioned, quick-tempered, verbally abusive, and widely considered impossible to talk to, but he affirmed that he would have died for any of his children and I never doubted that. My brother was my best buddy. I remember all but one of my ex-boyfriends with good will; I remember even that one with pity. Whether my business has been booming or bust, the best long-term relationships with clients have been about 2/3 female, but the vast majority of clients have been male. I've liked and learned from most of the men I've known. And yes, I still feel angry about the fact that girls and young women are harassed and molested  and yes, even today, sometimes even raped, wherever they go, even in their parents' or eventually their husbands' homes. 

I "get" the motive for rape--males who know they're not Real Men and never will be probably do like the idea that the most sensitive and vulnerable parts of their bodies can be used to injure somebody, if only easily intimidated females--but for the life of me I can't understand why we're allowing girls to grow up feeling too squeamish to go for those sensitive parts if these guys presume so far as to need to be told "Back off." Why are we not teaching little boys that, if another person does not hold eye contact and smile, they need to lower their eyes and move briskly along, not saying a word?!

It's easy to understand why women who were abused or abandoned by their male relatives, raped by their ex-boyfriends, beaten by their ex-husbands, etc., do feel a tremendous amount of anger. It's certainly appropriate for men to feel very cautious about exposing their sensitive parts. Pushy behavior from males may cause them to be mistaken for rapists and yes, THANK GOD, that no longer means they're likely to "score"--or even necessarily survive. It's unfortunate, though, that a woman who has had bones broken by an ex-husband is likely to avoid him and dump her anger on a nice, patient, gentle man who wants to be a father-substitute for her children--or on the children themselves. Women are socialized to deny their anger and this causes that anger to come out in some very sick ways. 

The writer of the article linked below may turn out to be another paid gender traitor, but I'm sharing the article for the observation that "Real women...lament the shortage of strong partners." It is so true. Women who had decent fathers living in the homes of their childhood do not want father-figures. We don't have a lot of tolerance for condescending assumptions about our not being able to take care of ourselves. But is it too much to ask that men, even at age sixty, be able to pull their own weight? 

I lament the shortage of men my age who want more out of our remaining years than to flop down in front of a television set and rot. I was really attracted to a man who was still working construction, when he was the age I am now, but I'd happily settle for one who was content to settle down and keep a store. I have no time to waste on the ones who just want to flop and grope, whining "I've worked for forty years and now I want to retire," and "If it's too late to have babies why should we wait for marriage?", and "Why not just sell the house and the land and the business and move into a nice little flat in the city." I don't know a single man my age (I do know just a few married ones) who is "strong" enough, if not to run his own business, at least to be a competent helpmate and housekeeper while I run mine.

https://pjmedia.com/gilda-carle/2025/09/10/rx-for-mens-mental-health-dump-mean-girls-and-choose-real-women-n4943517

I suspect, from her use of "dogwhistle" words, that Gilda Carle's next article will encourage men to choose the variety of women I call man traps. They don't mean their men any harm. They may be kind and even indulgent wives, if they've waited long enough that they are real women and not little girls in women's bodies. They are, however, a bit...Golgafrinchan. If men don't get bored and leave them first, they are the ones who will lie on the couch and decompose beside the sort of men who are single at sixty. 

Considering the Real Women I've observed, beside whom a man whose brain is still active would want to live beyond age sixty...I feel an article coming on. But not today.

Meanwhile, from North Carolina comes this:

[Photo from the railcar surveillance video. Comment from someone called Pixie on X.]

What can men do? People look at the small, scared Black guy cringing against the wall and the older man trying to stay out of it, and they see that hulking thug in the two men who were obviously scared of him. Is this fair? Is this right? 

It's not, but men have to make it change. The woman might have been able to change what happened on that video, in the rest of which the big Black guy battered and stabbed the little blonde. The men, especially the two of them together, would have had a better chance. 

The story is told of the karate master who was riding a train with one of his students when a drunk boarded the train. The drunk wasn't murderous--yet--but he was mean. He shoved and stepped on people, snarled angrily when someone complained. The student expected the karate master to rise up and knock the breath out of the drunk. Instead the karate master spoke to the drunk in a friendly way. "What have you been drinking? Sake? I like sake, too. I used to drink sake with some friends back in..." They got into a conversation about drinking, and friends, and home towns. The karate master deftly steered the drunk's mind into a sentimental mood...and the drunk apologized to everyone he had shoved and stepped on.

Not all of us are that good. 

Nevertheless...looking at that scene, just before the murder, I do think: Four to one? We can take him, no trouble. If the other three people are willing to do their bit. Four people can subdue one person, usually without touching him, when the one person sees the four pairs of eyes looking at him.

Say, "Hey." 

Say, "Hey man, what's up? Why are you hitting that chick?"

Chances are good that he'd say "I'm not hitting anybody."

Say, "We all saw you hit her. You, both of you, need to sit back down and wait for the Metrocops," or whatever they call the Charlotte equivalent of Metrocops. 

Or he might say, lying through his teeth, "Cos she's my [rude word for a prostitute] and she's been [rude words for doing worse things than that]." 

Say, "Well, you need some help with that. You can't just beat up a person who is that much smaller than you are. Just sit tight. Help is on the way." 

There are not a lot of men who will become violent if all four of the other people are watching them. He would probably have sat down and gone quietly. Even when they're stoned, most people remember that four people are just enough to immobilize their two hands and two feet.

There are Black men who could do more in a scene like this. Christian, Rastafarian, Muslim, even Buddhist men could get spiritual. Even a Humanist who doesn't believe in the Great Spirit could appeal to public spirit. "What'you trying to do? Start a race war? Brother, you better leave that girl alone. .. She's some White man's problem. Let him deal with her."

Some men (or women) might say, "I can't do that. Even on a work team with people I know, I'm just not a leader." They could learn the skills, but other forms of distraction might serve their needs even better. 

"I'm sicker/crazier than you are" has been known to work as a distraction. No direct challenge to a violent person is necessary to distract him enough to allow a prospective victim to run away. Anyone can start a loud, lively conversation with an imaginary friend--about sports or music, not about the immediate situation. Some people have the ability to faint, vomit, etc., when they're frightened; this can be useful. It's also worth the trouble to memorize a song you can belt out; I like "Jesus Saviour Pilot Me." A person who liked to live dangerously might touch the violent man's sleeve, smile, and say something bizarre--"Could I have your autograph please? You are Marshawn Lynch, aren't you?" or "My friend over there, you can't see him, he's from outer space, anyway he says..." 

"But that's dangerous! He might decide to kill me instead of her!" He might. All kinds of things might happen. The train might explode. The city might be demolished by a stray asteroid sucked into Earth's gravity field. The violent man might have a heart attack. The question is whether you did all you were able to do. You are the whatever-your-name-is of wherever-you're-from..."No, that's my father, or the Metrocops, or the government. They are supposed to take care of things." Maybe, but if they are not there, you're what is there in their place. You are there for a reason. 

Because the short guy (a teenager?) and the woman (his mother? grandmother?) got up and walked away, and the older man did nothing, scumbag felt empowered to commit murder. 

Don't let things like that happen, men. Even if you are Black. Even if you hate your local police...four to one! What are they going to do? 

It was because people didn't stand up to violent criminals that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, according to the prophet Ezekiel. Homosexual rape is an abomination but there has never been and will never be a city where anything like a majority of the population are tempted to it. If the gang who threatened the angels in the shape of young men had been Sodom's worst sinners, the angels could have dealt with them and the rest of the city would probably not have missed them. Because Sodom and Gomorrah were places where people let poor people starve, let young men be raped, and let other bad things happen, they were destroyed. 

I once ignored a cry for help, telling myself it was just another stupid freshman goofing around. The word "sodomy" means something else because the word "cowardice" had already been invented to describe the real sin of Sodom.

Painters, Opportunities for 

The young woman who was murdered in Charlotte was called Iryna Zarutska. She had a pretty face and some rich men have created a fund to award $1000 grants to painters who think they can paint a likeness of that face into a mural in "prominent locations" in their cities.

A better memorial to this poster girl for hatecrimes against women might be a year-long curfew on males in Charlotte, requiring all men and boys over age two to stay in their homes unless escorted by a responsible woman. Women would be the first to complain, but they'd benefit. 

Anyway, if you're good at drawing faces, e-mail: katie@eoghan.com .

Poetry 

Elegy for Charlie Kirk:

 

https://classicalpoets.org/2025/09/on-charlie-kirk-and-his-assassins-a-poem-by-brian-yapko/