Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Web Log for 11.19.24

Election 2024 

The shock waves continue. Naomi Wolf:


Glyphosate Awareness 

The "cola" in the URL indicates the article was written by Joseph Mercola. He's writing a bit beyond his pay scale and subject to correction by Real MD Doctors--if any of them have the fortitude to go there.


See if Windows tries to block this Friends of the Earth report on "New Roundup," this version hailed as glyphosate-free, which does not mean it won't make people ill. In fact it's expected to make more people sicker sooner than glyphosate did. If the link doesn't work, it's FOE's fault. Backspace through the URL to go to foe.org/resources/, scroll down to the article "New Roundup New Risks," and download it. The site has a really annoying chatbot that will try to ask you for money first. I politely told it "It's a good idea not to let anything pop up and interfere with reading," which got it out of the way long enough for the download to go through. You may need to tell it something else...


Music

Content warning: Aunts are not supposed to recommend songs like this one. It was apparently released in the campaign season, but wouldn't have been played on local radio. There's a lot of reference to the Democratic Party animal totem, which isn't really so bad. The Ds claimed 81 million votes, so, y'know, 81 million votes for their emblem. Unfortunately there's also an expression used to mean "annoyed" that I really think Kari Lake should not have stooped to using in public. Someone also shows confusion between the Mean Girl's given name and guacamole. Tsk. I laughed.

How I Spend My Weekends

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks how book reviewers spend our weekends.

Well, typically I spend substantial parts of weekends reading books. I am a Christian without a church; reading a Christian book on the Saturday and writing about it on the Sunday is one form of Christian fellowship I have. 

The other form is visiting and being visited by people in the real world. (I do know some people in the real world; I just have a rule of writing about public figures, hypothetical people with generic names, and animals.) Some local lurkers have communicated to me that this web site would interest them more if it contained more details about who sold what to whom, and why, and who married whom, and why, and whether they knew something about their bride's or bridegroom's past, and so on. I don't like to talk or write about that kind of thing. Someone always gets a detail wrong and the writer can then be sued. 

I can occasionally mention a bit of local news that all the local people already know. For example, the marching band from East Tennessee State University, where many Gate City students go because it's only about thirty miles' drive, won a competition and will be marching in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I would never mention their names but there is a possibility that people watching the parade on television will see a young relative, or relatives, of mine. I don't plan to watch television on Thanksgiving Day but no doubt I'll see the video recording later.

But as a rule the only part of any conversation with real-world friends that was ever supposed to appear on this web site were Grandma Bonnie Peters' recipes and any reminiscences the non-writers at this web site ever wrote down. 

Anyway, my weekends usually include books, conversation, and nature walks. And food, although the hazards of trying new recipes still keep me from posting much of what GBP hoped would be this web site's main attraction--delicious food that is naturally gluten-free and, preferably, vegan. 

And the cats. I don't actually spend a lot of time with the cats. They don't normally hang out in the office or go for walks or drives. They get breakfast and dinner and, on sunny days, the water-sharing ritual. If the weather is pleasant I'll probably sit down on the porch, usually about sunset, and pet each cat for a bit, and dangle a hedge trimming for them to chase, almost every day. The cats are my friends, very dear friends, but not my children.

Prayer is a part of my days. Sleeping is. Bathing and toothbrushing are. Some form and amount of music is, and at least a few rows of knitting. By Sunday night, I'm usually on the screen porch, with a heater and bundles of knitted fabric as they become necessary, writing and scheduling the pre-scheduled posts for this web site. 

This all sounds very routine. Well, it is. The reward of a life well lived is that eventually you get to have a routine. There is also room for adventures in my weekends but, since, they involve other people, I don't write about them.

How do you spend your weekends? If you're a reviewer I have read or will soon read your blog. If not, please feel free to answer in the comments section.


Book Review: Dark Roots

Title: Dark Roots

Author: Lucius Valiant

Date: 2023

Publisher: Thornhill

Quote: "The rumor was that he already had a little vampire in his blood to begin with, and that a hunting accident had caused it to soar past the strict 30% threshold."

So Ramsay is no longer allowed to hunt, and he resents having heard Harlan, the narrator, described as the Van Helsing Society's "most promising hunter." His goal is to ensure that Harlan will be forbidden to hunt, just as he is.  

Will Harlan gain status by hunting down the Highgate vampires...after discovering that they're what's left of his blood relatives? Or will this be the rare novel in which the narrator's antagonist is the one who achieves his goal? I'm not telling.

Vampire stories aren't my favorite genre but, if they're yours, you will probably like this one. It's told by Victorian rules; if the vampires get up to any incestuous orgies, we're not told about it. All we see them do is bite. Though one biting scene goes into lurid details Bram Stoker tastefully withheld.

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Why America Needs More Baby-Free Adults

It's an inescapable, self-evident truth: Our world needs fewer and better babies.

By "better" I mean, primarily, healthier thanks to the benefits of having adequate space to grow in, and more intelligent thanks to the benefits of growing up among adults not children. 

There are different ways of being intelligent. One way is to recognize the symptoms of overcrowding--loss of a sense of the value of human life, sterility, "alternative sexual identities," loss of resistance to diseases, "depression," violent hostility--in our daily news. We need to stop population growth at a point that allows most if not all people to live well, with land of their own and meaningful employment. We have passed that point. So: time to slow down on baby production. We have reached the time when it was prophesied that the barren would have more blessings than the fruitful. Human scientific progress has reached a point where we can choose, instead of having a plague or a war, just to have fewer babies. 

"Billions" means that there are a thousand times more humans than there need to be; that in order to get back to optimal population levels in one generation, only one person in a thousand should have one baby. We're not likely to achieve that but, certainly, every baby-free adult is helping humankind.

Our Vice-President-elect made an idle remark about "childless cat ladies" as people he did not expect to vote for him. It wasn't very funny but I proposed that some of us who had held our noses and voted for the lesser evil should have "Childless Cat Lady" printed on T-shirts and wear them to R victory parties. 

Then that opened the door for really sick ideas about baby-free adults to start spewing out of some Rs. Is it "bad for society" when people aren't married or don't have children? It's bad for society when people have babies because they don't realize that they could have good lives without babies. It's bad for society when a child is not a choice. It's bad for society when people don't understand that our animal urge to reproduce can and should be sublimated into our human sense of vocations to produce all sorts of things other than babies.

Let's face it. America is greying. Into the lives of greying people there comes a time when we know that babies, travel, etc., are ceasing to be valid excuses for not rescuing animals from shelter, and we may acquire more animal companions than we can pet at one time. This is known as The Many Paws. It's a wonderful time of life. There are a lot of us, male and female, never married, formerly married, and still married, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, enjoying Many Paws in baby-free homes. 

I think it's a mistake for people to think of animals as children. Animals are, or become, adults of their kind. They have their own parents and their own babies, in addition to any humans they have trained to fetch food for them. Animals are our friends. Our work is our "babies." Or rather, since we're all called to work but only some of us are called to have babies, parenting is one of many uses to which we can put our human brains. 

We might do better to think of having babies as one of the lower forms of work. We already do know that it can be an excuse, and even an actual cause, for lack of success in work--"Daddy was a farmer but all he ever raised was us." We could do more, as a society, to encourage people to think beyond the nursery. We already know that, when "Mary is a teacher, John is a lawyer, and Jane is the mother of...", Jane is going to be the insecure one, inclined to obesity and depression, in need of help to find an identity she does not share with a stray dog.

I saw a video where a larval Republican, obviously thinking of a specific person as her stereotype of "childless cat ladies," asked, "Are those the kind of people you want running society?" Well. I think of a fat White woman I saw, carrying a baby and leading a toddler, on the Metro where it's illegal to eat or drink or carry food and drink in open containers. The toddler wasn't even whining but the horrorcow shoved a stick of sticky sweet sculch into its mouth. "Excuse me," I said, "it's illegal to have food on the Metro." Horrorcow, clearly feeling that trains full of roaches were better than the thought of teaching her child to wait for anything, brayed "He can eat if he wants to!" Are THOSE the kind of people you want running society? Or running around loose? Of course giving birth does not automatically make people selfish, greedy scofflaws, but you must admit there are correlations among personality traits...

No. The democratic process allows multi-infant horrorcows to vote and trusts that there will be enough decent human beings to offset the damage they do. Sometimes after age forty a multi-infant horrorcow even whips herself into shape, gets a job, and becomes a useful member of society--though it may not be possible for that ever to be said for the surplus humans she's inflicted on the world. 

Surplus humans. Yes, Mommy-nom-nom. Human life is cheap. Countries as close to civilization as Japan and Canada have talked openly about thinning the herd, and from some US hospitals that reported high COVID fatalities have come reports that sound like an unofficial version of the same. If we don't want to become a society that talks frankly about the benefits of killing people with chronic illness or disability, we want to become a society where breeders bow their heads and murmur "Thank you for your continence" when the baby-free pass by. 

We want to become a society where teenagers are exposed to, and tested on, information about the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth in enough detail that a majority of boys opt for vasectomies--why waste all that rubber? We want to be a society that rewards celibacy even more than marriage. We want to be a society where baby-free couples are seen as heroes of public spirit. We want to be a society that "sells" baby-freedom in every way, short of punishing the innocent babies. Where mommies and daddies can earn enough money to feed their broods, e.g., but promotion to management jobs is reserved for the baby-free.

We want those things because, although they run counter to generations of instincts that told us that our lives would be short and we needed as many babies as possible, they are also what will protect us from paying the favored type to have more babies while slaughtering the less favored type of humans. In order to be Nazi leaders Hitler and his colleagues had to be drugged-out and probably literally demonized, but it did start with "We love babies, we idealize the genotype that withstands even inbreeding among beautiful, hardy, healthy Icelanders, but we can't afford a socialist system for very many people..."They really couldn't. So they started killing. 

Well, we don't want killing, and the alternative costs just a dime. It works like this: The woman holds the dime between her knees whenever the couple are together. 

So then...the normal human instinct for self-actualization is always impeded when people "run down to babies." People are more likely to feel that they've succeeded at being themselves, doing what they were meant to do, when they're not entangled in diapers. 

The normal family does not and never did consist of two adults and two children moved all over the country by corporate whims. Real families have roots, and there are more adults than the breeding pair in each one. The Bible writers spoke of Abraham's travels almost as glibly as if the man had been riding around like a lonesome cowboy with only a horse to talk to, but actually he travelled with a cantankerous wife, an elderly father, a nephew he and his wife had taken in to raise, animals by the thousands, and enough hired men to match a city-state's army--and win. Real families have grandparents, they have nephews, they have aunts and uncles and cousins. Baby-free people should not be imagined as anti-family, but as those aunts and uncles the family needs. Babies should not be left with strangers or in "day care centers," but sent to visit aunts or grandmothers, when the parents need baby-free space. 

Despite the evil machinations of corporate employers, who feel powerful when they separate people from their family base, reality is that baby-free adults do not lead "childless" lives. We spend more time with children who are old enough to be good company than with yowling, drooling infants--a big improvement. We get some choice about how much time we spend with the next generation. Most of us enjoy our nieces and nephews, and of course those who became baby-free by rearing children to adulthood notoriously dote on their grandchildren. Many baby-free adults are interested in homeschooling because, after about grade three, we're called in as upper-level teachers./Our baby-making siblings went to the same high schools we did but they've forgotten a lot since they had these babies.

I think it would be good for children if we moved in the direction of being a society where people had ancestral homes, where people were free to travel but always knew where "home" was. A "citizen of the world" is a homeless, rootless wretch. We learn to be citizens by being citizens of a particular house in a particular neighborhood. Children need the controlled adventures of walking from Mommy's and Daddy's house to Uncle John's house next door, then Grandmother's house up the road, then Aunt Jane's house on the other side of town. Many families have lost that privilege by failing to acknowledge the roles of baby-free relatives in completing a family. "Nuclear families" are like isolated atoms, apt to be smashed or lose their elemental integrity; they need to reunite into extended families to be really part of their element.

I personally don't know any baby-free people who really feel that "the cats are my children." Joke about it, maybe. Cats are remarkably unrewarding substitutes for children. They can be great friends to those who appreciate them for what they are, but for a baby-substitute a rock would have to work better. How does any reasonable aunt deal with cravings for child company? She invites the nieces and nephews to visit, of course. A good aunt spoils children, now and then, swooping in with saved-up money to ask "Who wants to go to the mall, or the beach, or Dollywood?" A good aunt also makes children feel spoiled when they're being invited to help paint a room or pick fruit. Grandma Bonnie Peters taught a grandchild of the appropriate age to work for the privilege of vacuum-cleaning her carpets. Baby-free adults normally interact with children only for fun, and can enjoy feeling "more popular" than beloved parents are as children drop everything at the happy cry, "Grandma's here!" Cats...well...they can love and be loved. Some cats do try to cheer up humans who aren't feeling good; some will fight in defense of their humans, and some will try to lead their humans away from what they think may be danger. Cats do not really have many interests in common with humans. Nor do dogs, although dogs make even more persistent efforts to redirect humans' attention to the interests we do have in common with dogs. 

But why, given that aunts and uncles and grandparents have all these natural, wholesome outlets for any baby-specific component in our instinct to do productive work, are there baby-free adults who direct what seem like frustrated parental instincts into nannyism? They live to help others, no matter how hard the others try to escape. Legislation that purports to keep people "safe" is usually subsidized by corporations (insurance companies that don't want to pay if someone falls off a bicycle, manufacturers that want to protect the world from the risk of not buying all of their products) and should not be blamed on aunts. There are, however, some detestable renegade aunts who are not welcomed by their nieces and nephews, so they feel sad and rejected, and take it out of everyone else by supporting those stupid corporate laws. It's not saaafe to let the children walk to and from school! Better to expose them to all those germs on the bus and then let them play football for exercise! And it's not saaafe to burn the leaves in the yard! Better to spray poison on the yard! And oh dear you'd better put down that stick before you hit OOOFFF...

Why do these people always seem to line up on the Left? "Seem to" is a keyword. They have in fact been found on the Right, but the Left gives them more visibility when they can be persuaded to whine about how they need a big, all-powerful government to keep them safe from their fool selves. A delegate to a Democratic Party convention, early in the present century, stood up in front of a TV camera and loudly proclaimed, "I have a broken brain!" Indeed. Childlessness may be an accompanying symptom, or an effect, of nannyism but the primary cause is the broken brain.

And then there are the poor souls who vote for all the nannyism and nincompoopery. Their plight really is sad. They are nice, normal, baby-free adults. You might be their housemate or co-worker and notice nothing wrong with them. What happened to them? Maybe they went to a "good" college on a scholarship and alienated some people who didn't have to earn scholarship-worthy grades. Maybe they had enough sense not to want to marry a college boy, however promising, and while they were keeping in touch with the college boys as friends, more desperate females threw themselves at the college boys, who are still trying to figure out exactly what they were thinking when they proposed marriage to the desperate females. (Or it might be the other way round; the pressure on men to get married, just to fit in, works differently but it works on men too.) So they were fresh out of college with their job skills and their jobs and their sweet youthful faces and their crazy adolescent energy. And then...

Maybe they thought the church could use their energy, and then they were allowed to read or overhear some "inside" church discussion of what to do about the horrible plague of single adults in the church. 

Maybe they thought that, although they were paying off their student debt faster in industry jobs, they liked teaching, so they volunteered as substitutes or teachers' aides or maybe PTA officials, and they heard all the women who'd failed to get good jobs spitting about their not having babies yet. 

Too many "conservative" groups have fallen into a habit of thinking of human beings as animals in a Noah's Ark toy to line up two by two. Oh, XYZ has a great singles group! These women hoped for the sort of casual fun they had in college activity groups, hiking, singing, volleyball for all I know. So they went to the singles group and someone grabbed them by their arms and plopped them down at tables facing the most unattractive men in the Eastern States, and ordered them to chat. 

So they said, "I have a home. I need to go back to it now. Right now. I might have left something turned on," and they went home. 

And then on the Left, even though some of it was pretty off-putting, they found such a warm, welcomng atmosphere. People noticed their job skills and offered them government jobs. They found housemates. They found other dog walkers walking at the same times they walked their dogs. Most of their new friends didn't have children, or even spouses, so there was no pressure about their being single. They never have believed any of the D party froth about how horrible Republicans are...but they have to admit they've known Rs who were pretty unpleasant to know, while these Ds are practically congenial...

Many of the different groups that are classified as conservative, in the United States, are bigoted against single, baby-free adults, and end up pushing them into the anti-marriage Left, even though the reason why the Loony Left was anti-marriage always has been that Loony Left men think all attractive women should be involved in theoretically state-paid, free-to-the-user prostitution. So we meet Ds who are still single at age forty or fifty because most people they know just don't like the idea of marriage anyway, and they've never found anyone that they liked the idea of marriage to, either. They're not anti-marriage themselves. When they're not in the city doing their jobs they like hanging out with their nephews. But they don't want to join the anti-bachelor social circles they left, or support whatever political ideas those people support, which just about have to be bad because those people are so icky. Whole neighborhoods in Washington are full of these bachelors. They actually belong to nice families, and like their families, but they have been alienated by hateful bigots who call themselves "pro-family." So they reach age sixty or seventy still trying to identify primarily with their buddies, like high school kids. (Many of them are still renting apartments and don't even have pets.)

They were my buddies once. I still have a few car-pool lists of dozens, hundreds, of them who were in various activity groups in Washington. Network members, prospective housemates, foster parents of my adoptive sister's school friends, dance partners, band members, hiking buddies, car pools, activists working on the same issues, dates. Marriage was almost like quitting school, a defection, a rejection of friends. A lot of us were still in that school when I left the city. Our lives were good, at the time. We were the bright young things sipping overpriced coffee at Starbucks. Now, as some of us begin to consider being old as a thing that can happen to us...in the famous words, to all old buddies going home to "take your place there the spent and maimed among," I hope all of you can "find one face there you loved when all was young."

Conservatives might get away with a few witticisms about the "childless" people who vote D, because most baby-free people that I know are comfortable with ourselves and can take a joke. Still, they'd do well to work on a positive outreach to welcome more unmarried aunts and uncles, more widows in no hurry to remarry, and more grandparents back into "the family." Honor and celebrate our single-mindedness. Save any job that involves making decisions, or could potentially involve overtime work, or would ever involve travel even to a different town, for someone who is baby-free. Thank us for our self-control and public spirit. Make sure that those of us who are not, in fact, Marxists are appreciated for our kind of political, or civic, or religious activity. 

Churches could, for a start, organize more things for men's groups and women's groups, or for real family groups as distinct from couples, with spaces for aunts, uncles, and grandparents as part of the family. They could talk openly about how at one time God commanded humans to "be fruitful and multiply," but now it's plainly written in the Book of Nature that God has crossed this one off our list of things to do and now wants us to focus on practicing good will toward one another. 

All of us could do with a bit of detachment from what may actually be selfish genes prompting us to babble, "But I don't want my heirs to look Chinese, I want a red-haired blue-eyed grandson with double-jointed thumbs like my grandfather..." Have a little faith at least in genetic science. For better or worse, whether or not we have grandchildren and whether or not our grandchildren resemble us more than they do their other grandparents, our genes will pop up again. 

Book Review: Dragonfly

Title: Dragonfly

Author: Resa Nelson

Date: 2015

Quote: "You long for the Northlands beause you'd fit in. You'd look like everyone else."

In this fantasy world, drawn from fragments of Scandinavian sagas, Northlanders in their long ships travel regularly back and forth to the country of the Shining Star People. They've set up forges (the old word "smithy" appears in the text, misspelled as "smithery"). Even their girls are strong enough to be blacksmiths. Greeta's mother,, who may be dead, was a blacksmith. And a fair bit of intermarriage has gone on. Poor little Greeta feels that she's an object of superstitious horror because she's blonde, but that's only the beginning. When she leaves her village in search of people like her and finds a blond man who is rich, single, and interested in her, but she thinks he's not properly respectful of the dragons he's breeding, Greeta discovers that she's also a shapeshifter--by turning into a dragon.

She may have found the man she's looking for, by the end of this book, but it'll take a few more adventures for them to be sure. This is the first full-length adventure story in a series.

I didn't get into it, but some people do. 

Monday, November 18, 2024

Book Review: Wormwood Abbey

Title: Wormwood Abbey

Author: Christina Baehr

Date: 2023

Quote: "You couldn't sell Wormwood Abbey. You don't own it. The abbey owns us."

The quaint laws of Victorian England make Edith's father the heir to the house called Wormwood Abbey while Gwendolyn and her siblings are still living there. Edith's father proposes to sell the old place, but Gwendolyn wants to stay there, though she doesn't seem to like the place. To understand why Edith has to find out the secret of Wormwood Abbey.

The secret is that "worm" comes from the old word for dragon, and "wood" from "ward" or keeper. Edith was born with a special mutation, which people in our real world used to believe in, that makes her an Hereditary Dragon Keeper. 

But that's not all. There are some adventures; there will be more for the young people to do. This is the first novel in a five-book series. Those who enjoy historical dragon stories will want to read all five. 

Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Auriger

Graphium auriger is the Gold Bearer. In a group of what are usually counted as sixteen species of African Graphiums that all look very much alike, auriger is the one with a touch of gold-yellow on its black and white wings. The yellow is not always visible from above...


Photo by ShinK. As in other Swallowtail species, the wings can look blue-black and blue-white in some lights, dark and light gray in others, and they fade to brown and beige. 

An early name proposed for this species was Papilio harpagon. Papilio was the genus name used for all Swallowtails until it became overcrowded and was broken up. Harpagon was the name Moliere gave his "Miser" character, a caricature of a greedy old man who cares more about his money than about his children. Well...to be fair...butterflies have no family bond with their offspring, and the ones with yellow hairs and scales are indeed attached to their "gold"...but Swallowtails were supposed to be named after heroes, not buffoons, in literature.

It is found in central Africa. Some sources mention sightings in Congo, Cameroon, and Guinea, but it's usually reported in Gabon. It has not received a great amount of attention. Some argue that it's not "really" different enough from Graphium schubotzi to be a distinct species. It's not common, but not known to be extremely rare or endangered.

Its wingspan is three or four inches. Bold and showy, it goes for warning colors rather than camouflage.  

Drawings of what are said to be a typical male and female are found on pages 96 and 97: 

Sunday, November 17, 2024

Web Log for 11.15-16.24

Animals 

The Red Admiral butterfly was known as a British species before it was known as an American species; it has a British name. What may be changing is its ability to winter in England. It's a migratory species. Individual butterflies may lay eggs in places where overnight lows drop below freezing, but those eggs apparently don't hatch; butterflies reappear in the North as individuals that hatched in the South fly northward in spring. This species' ability to overwinter in England would be evidence of dramatic warming, the kind that's likely to be local not global.


Book 

Alice Walker's daughter's: 


What a cute cover! It's a picture book. To some extent we can judge a picture book by its cover.

Education 

I'd like to see Religious Right types read this. If they let their children take the brain-rest courses, why complain that what's taught in those courses is second-rate? 


Is this web site still being read at public high schools? Hard to tell; as the page view numbers rise, the correlation between readership and school schedules is obscured. Anyway, if you are a public high school student reading this web site, my concern is not with your exposure to opinions you might not agree with, but with your lack of exposure to material that big-name universities want you to have. Once people are thirteen or fourteen years old they should be able to deal with the fact that somewhere two boys have kissed each other. If your teacher is kissing boys in your class, now that would be a problem. My question is whether you're learning algebra, history, geography, languages and literature, some sort of job skill each term and some sort of creative art. You should not have time for courses with "relationships" in the title, in high school. If somebody tries to push you into such a course, don't fight back with the whine that it's going to "groom" you for toxic relationships to see the kind of relationships other people have. That's like sending your parents into the principal's office to say "Our kid is stupid." Fight back with a reasonable assertion like "There's only time for six classes in a day and I want Algebra, HTML, Literature, Biology, Japanese, and Classical Orchestra, not this twaddle about 'relationships'." If all you want to do at school is doze off and let left-wingnuts indoctrinate you, don't blame them for trying it.

High school is the place to take courses that are fun, that appeal to lots of young people, that you could not do at home or church. My husband used to chide me for slacking off and taking courses in Spanish at school. Anybody can learn Spanish on the street--at school one should take a language that's not spoken on the street. He took German! Then I'd chide him back because he never read or talked German and had forgotten most of what he'd learned. I say some of you Nephews had a brief exposure to Cantonese as children, and I'd like to see you keep up with it. If that means you have to seek out Chinese-American friends? You could do worse. All I'll say about taking Spanish in high school is that at the time that seemed the only way to keep that language in my mind, in Gate City, and I missed it. But some of you live in cities and can take courses from educated native speakers of Russian or Korean or who knows what-all, and I would like it if you became fluent in languages that I can't speak. Neither high school nor college should be wasted. Take Marching Band. Take ROTC. Take Golf, if your school offers it. Opportunities aren't likely to come again. Talking about relationships? You can do that for free when you reach the room-renting stage and have housemates.

Hurricane

Appalachian Voices, best known as a printed news magazine, is really trying to make this web site a central hub for post-hurricane relief efforts. Some shelters are now overstocked with water! Others are not, and they're still looking for the big, expensive, important donations like generators as well as little things like personal hygiene supplies. 


Political discrimination? The sort of un-American political discrimination that's typical of the backward European and Asian countries that want to tell us how to do things? Here's a good point for swamp drainage: For any position in the federal government that puts employees in direct contact with taxpayers, if Republicans have not spontaneously recommended an employee for giving good service to taxpayers regardless of their known (or guessed) political positions, that employee can have no public-contact position in the federal government ever again. Positions that involve no decision-making and minimal interaction with the public, such as groundkeepers', building maintenance staff's, cafeteria cooks' and dishwashers', machine repair staff's, and nightwatchmen's jobs, deserve more respect (and better pay) than they have often had. What better way to boost the status of these necessary jobs than by filling them with former office managers. Meanwhile those federal employees who do have contact with the public should recite daily, befoire sitting down in their offices, "I am especially responsible for pleasing those taxpayers who believe my position should not exist. My job is to convince those people that I deserve to have a job."


Knitting 

Butterflies are the pretty face of Glyphosate Awareness. Here's a way to knit a band of butterflies around your winter cap. You can order a winter cap, with butterflies or some other motif, from this web site for $10 plus shipping ($5 in the US, per package; four to six caps will usually fit into a package).

Morgan Griffith on Border Policies

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"

After the election of President-elect Trump, one change expected for the incoming Administration is the reversal of the Biden-Harris Administration’s open borders policies.

During Trump’s first term, securing the border was a priority. Thanks to the institution of policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, Trump stemmed the tide of illegal immigration across our southern border.

According to a report from the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security (Mark Green), between Fiscal Years 2017 and 2020 under Trump, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported 3 million illegal alien encounters nationwide.

Under Biden-Harris, these policies were discarded or allowed to expire. As a result, illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border has exploded.

Moreover, catch-and-release practices under Biden’s Administration contributed to the release of millions into the interior of the United States without sufficient vetting or screening, heightening public and national security concerns.

Since Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, there have been more than 10.4 million illegal alien encounters nationwide, according to CBP data.

These millions of illegal aliens receive benefits in the forms of significant medical attention and health care, access to education and enrollment in social service programs like SNAP, at the expense of American taxpayers at the local, state and federal levels.

This is unsustainable, and Americans sent an overwhelming message this year that border security must be taken more seriously.

With a change in White House leadership, House Republicans and some Democrats are committed to working with President Trump to strengthen our border and equip border patrol authorities with the necessary tools and resources to stem the flow of illegal immigration.

Although not yet in office, Trump’s election is sending shockwaves to illegal aliens.

Reuters News highlights a migrant caravan traveling through Mexico in November that has shrunk in size following news of his election.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met with heads of CBP as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to discuss operational readiness in the event of a migrant influx. In other words, preparing for a rush across the border before it is too late.

NBC News cites the operator of a migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, who predicts smugglers will pressure immigrants to start crossing now before it is too late.

The operator of the shelter might call them smugglers, but the rest of us know them as “coyotes” who work for the illicit Mexican cartels.

President-elect Trump has announced he will tap his former acting ICE director, Tom Holman, as his border czar.

Holman will work to reverse Biden-Harris open borders policies and activate immigration enforcement, and that includes migrant deportations, starting with those who have committed crimes.

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, also estimates that there are roughly 1.3 million immigrants who have already been issued removal orders but remain in the United States.

States will have a hand in contributing to the deportation effort. Governor Youngkin understands the importance of this subject. Virginia communities, including rural ones like some in the Ninth District, have seen the threats posed by gang-related activity and drug trafficking.

Back in 2017, Lynchburg teen Raymond Wood was abducted and brutally murdered in Bedford County by members of MS-13, a mainly Salvadoran gang. Six men were charged and convicted.

The Mexican-based New Generation Jalisco Cartel had roots in towns such as Axton in Henry County, where they stored and distributed drugs.

As the fentanyl crisis, fueled by Mexican cartels, upends American communities, it will be essential to stem illegal drugs from coming across the border. And we must curtail the cartel’s side business of bringing illegal immigrants here.

Some Democratic governors are already objecting to the idea of working with the incoming Trump Administration to assist deportation efforts. Interestingly, some of the same people were requesting assistance with the overwhelming surge in migration to their states earlier this year!

Is deportation new? No!

President Obama oversaw the deportation of more than five million people as commander-in-chief (although that number pales in comparison to the Administrations of Presidents Clinton and Bush, who deported more than 10 million each).

Mexico must also cooperate fully with the Trump Administration to curb illegal immigration. Days after the election, Mexico’s newly elected President Claudia Sheinbaum called Trump.

Because of the Biden Administration, every community in America is a border community. This trend must be reversed, and I will do whatever I can to support President-elect Trump’s goal in closing the border.

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

Book Review: God's Love in Action

Title: God's Love in Action

Author: Kiana Jackson-Resendez

Date: 2024

ISBN: 979-8-9899419-1-9

Quote: "I've got the rhythm of love."

This quirky picture book features Isaias, "the first student" at a school where all the other students are color drawings. Isaias does some things that children should know better than to do before they go to school. The text then invites child readers to touch the book, or the computer screen, to indicate what he ought to do in each situation. Should Isaias push another child aside on his way up the slide, or wait in line behind the other child (who is a cartoon figure while Isaias is a live photo spliced into the drawing)? In between scenes Isaias dances to a refrain, "I've got the rhythm of love."

Having been a five-year-old who really did, of my own free will, "practice" for school by playing with imaginary classmates, being mindful of whether I might have bumped into an imaginary person while racing around the room, I can say that this way of presenting basic information about good manners makes intuitive sense for some children. Whether parents want to teach children to put their hands on computer screens is another question. I'd teach children to touch screens only with the special stylus or, better yet, use only electronic devices that have proper keyboards. 

The PDF e-book I received looks as if there is or will soon be an interactive version with sound and animation. I didn't get that version.

Friday, November 15, 2024

Ode to the Long Awaited November Rain

In a land of endless summer
smoke and dust make brazen air
like a greenhouse glass; a bummer
if we live or sojourn there.

So returning to the moody
places where four seasons roll
and November's bleak and broody
is refreshing to the soul.

Though the air's a long time cleaning,
in the end the scent of rain
gathers to itself the meaning
of refreshment for the brain.

Hail the bleakness of November
onto which we can project
all things tedious to remember
(even those that we elect),

stash provisions in a bunker,
break out quilts and rocking chairs,
gather with our cronies, hunker
round the fire like sleepy bears,

until positively freezing
wind blows in to dissipate
mists of all that's been unpleasing,
and we eagerly await

ice and snow and all December's
round of primal winter-bliss;
sing and dance around the embers,
light the next fire's logs from this.

We can do without November,
some say. Do they say amiss?
Frostless, colorless September
said to us, this year: Remember
winter's own peculiar bliss. 

This poem was suggested by Rosemary Nissen-Wade, who lives where November is a spring month:

Feline Friday: Adoptable Dogs and Cats

This week, the Petfinder photo contest joins other animal blogs for FELINE FRIDAY. This post is long because it anticipates new readers. Most Petfinder posts will be short, focussed on the pets

First, a bit of breaking news...Petfinder sends out e-mails when a special animal they know somebody Out There wants to meet gets into a shelter near their correspondents. Calling all Maine Coon Cat fanciers! Here's your chance to meet two of those great shaggy sassy cats (crossbreeds, but for their young age they are big, shaggy, and sassy) at the Kingsport shelter. 


Each kitten has its own web page, though minimal information has been entered. Here's Jenny kitten's page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/jenny-73937779/tn/kingsport/united-states-animal-rescue-tn1062/


They're only summer kittens, barely old enough to be adopted. They may become normal-sized adult cats, the kind who weigh just ten or twelve pounds under the fluff, or extra-large ones--the kind who weigh thirty pounds, and when they put up their paws for a snuggle they're already hugging you around the waist without needing to be picked up.. Both kittens are female. There is some possibility that the shelter is not demanding they be adopted together because both of them are going to be Queen Cats when they grow up.

The wild ancestors of today's domestic cats were, like Norwegian Forest Cats, extra-large, taking up to five years to reach a healthy adult size of twenty to thirty pounds. Some people think that means that extra-large cats will be healthier and more natural. Meh...some are, some aren't. Some big domestic cat bloodlines do include genetic weaknesses--mostly heart disease from what I've heard. 

There's a superstition that orange cats are unlucky. Actually it depends on which side of the English Channel your ancestors used to live on. Generally in England orange cats were thought to attract bad luck and black cats good luck, and in France it was the other way round! Could this once have had something to do with the pets kept by the leaders on each side? Is there any scientific basis for this superstition? Well, scientifically, reddish fur is more common in male cats, black fur in females; orange females and black male cats are "normal" but they're minorities. Maybe your choice of superstitions depends on whether you think tomcat odor or kittens is worse luck. However, when you adopt a shelter pet, nearly all shelters' policy will require that the likelihood of both be greatly reduced. 

In honor of Peaches, today's cat photo contest is for pale orange, or peaches-and-cream, cats. For new readers, I used to live with a cat who helped me pick three of the best cat photos on Petfinder in a different category each time. Then we expanded the search to dogs. Then Petfinder added some cookies that made the site hard to use and I stopped doing Petfinder photo contests. That could easily happen again, and meanwhile I now live with a cat who disapproves of computers and has never participated in the photo contest...but while it can, this web site tries to increase attention to the adorable, adoptable animals on Petfinder with its weekly photo contest.

It's not unusual for a photo contest winner to be adopted before someone with whom you've shared the photo makes the time to visit the shelter, or meet the foster pet. (Several organizations in the Petfinder network don't even have public shelters.) No worries. They probably have another homeless pet who may well be even more adorable in real life. 

For local dog lovers, Petfinder has no special breed alerts. Local dogs up for adoption all seem to be pit bull mixes. Even the ones that are described as some other kind of mix show a generous proportion of pit-bull-like features. Somebody Out There ought to have some love to spare for some of these pit bulls, who did not ask to be bred for sale to teenagers who wanted to look tough and then abandoned when the Navy told them to leave their dogs at home. Petfinder is actually putting some dogs from other places on the local web page just to bring in a little diversity. 

I'm glad the shelter rules demand that all these pit bulls be neutered. I miss the days when our local dog population was dominated by friendlier and, to my eyes, better-looking hounds--some beagles and bassets, mostly black-and-tans. However, in honor of the mostly innocent dogs sharing the Kingsport shelter with Jenny and Peaches, this week's dog photos will celebrate a breed that has been excessively and unjustly feared. Pit bull terriers are tough little beasts, and I see them as a homely-looking breed, but they can be good pets if treated kindly and firmly. The general category of medium-to-small dogs called terriers, French for dirt-diggers, were originally bred for an instinct to dig out and devour whole colonies of rats. They can be good watchdogs and baby-sitters too.

Photo picks are arbitrary and in no way determine which pet you, the reader, should adopt or help a petless friend to adopt. I look at photos in only one category each week. Some shelter workers, most of whom are volunteers, take better pictures than others. Your taste may differ from mine anyway, and sometimes I choose among equally adorable finalists by going with the one nearest the top of the Petfinder page as being the one closest to the zipcode specified. 

Well, yesterday was a Thursday that felt like a Monday. On Monday Net Galley e-mailed the news that Isabel Allende had written a new novel. Naturally I put my name on the list of would-be reviewers. So on Thursday Random House e-mailed that they'd picked me. I've been picked to write a blurb for a book by Isabel Allende. I SA BEL A LLEN DE! WOOT! Next on my bucket list is writing a blurb for Big Steve! ("King" is not my real-world name, and Stephen King is not a relative so far as anyone knows.) 

If you share the quirk of reading books in two languages, side by side, when possible, you already know Isabel Allende. La Casa de los Espiritus, Afrodita (Aphrodite), Zorro, Mi Pais Inventado (My Imaginary Country), more. Some time this winter there'll be a new one on the list. Check Amazon and Bookshop. Meanwhile, this web site continues to present a book a day, some likely to become classics, some fun to read, some...self-published by people who should have consulted a traditional publisher, but it's all good.

Anyway I was reading an extraordinary debut novel, and then I was kvelling and downloading, and then I was called away from the computer...you know how it goes. I did not spend much time link-hunting yesterday. The links I'd started to put in a Web Log were about animals, too, though not pets, so here they are:

Animals, Wild

By way of interference with my attempts to read and write about Hemileuca slosseri, Google got into its head that we all need to see this new photo essay. which does include a photo of H. diana. It really is a splendid photo essay, even if you don't share the author's fascination with beetles. I complained vigorously about its being shoved at me in place of something about H. slosseri when I'd put quotation marks around "hemileuca slosseri" in the search bar, but these pictures were too good not to share, The landscapes are beautiful and there's a kangaroo-rat photo you should probably hide from children, because they will want a kangaroo-rat for a pet, and the species has never adapted to domestication. The essay says nothing about H. slosseri; the author's team don't even go to a place where it lives. This is west Texas and New Mexico.


Among other things, clear close-up photos of a chickadee:


In further news, this week I cut open a tomato that didn't look, feel, or smell overripe. Underripe, if anything. And I nearly dropped it--was that a worm popping out of the cut edge?! No. Upon inspection, this tomato's seeds were sprouting inside it before the tomato even smelled ready to eat. It was one of those days when I wish I had a digital camera. 

Out here in the Point of Virginia we finally had some rain, yesterday. We needed it. The water table is way low. The ground and all the fallen leaves were dry as a tinderbox. Someone posted video of a brush fire that got out of hand in the Northern Appalachian mountains. It could easily have happened here--we are used to living in a damp climate, and it makes us careless about the fire safety precautions that are drilled into children out West. Rain reminded me of Hurricane Helene, of which the last rain the Cat Sanctuary had seen was the Edge. 

It's still impossible to forget that we got only the Edge. Even in Virginia the flash floods took out some bridges, the deliveryman reported when he brought the cats their Pure Life water. People still need bottled water, and camping and cleaning and household-repair supplies, and clean new school supplies for school-aged children, and trailers and trailer houses as available, and especially M O N E Y. Western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee are still real disaster areas. Come out and be a tourist and see what they're dealing with, if you can. The oak and beech trees on the hills still look gorgeous, the weather is still unusually mild this year, the art scene is still happening. 

The resident cats here like to share a bottle of water with me. We have a ritual where I open a bottle, pour a little water into a dish for each cat, and finish the bottle myself. If I don't do this, even in cool weather, by now the Queen Cat Serena looks at me as if to say "Was it something I said?" There are some other brands of bottled water they like, some expensive ones that claim to be from pure mountain springs, and a cheap brand that used to taste better, actually, but then the store had some trouble with a bad batch. So we now officially drink Pure Life, which is filtered tap water actually, but it's endorsed by Serena ni Burr mac Irene ni Candice ni Bisquit ni Polly ni Patchnose, the heir to seven generations of truly extraordinary cats, the first generation of which were found in an alley in Kingsport.

Fictional Kingsport was a spooky, fog-haunted place on the New England coast frequented by the sort of creepy creatures Lovecraft liked to write about. Real Kingsport is a sunny, well planned factory town built on the high ground above a confluence of rivers near the Tennessee-Virginia border; it's been called a colonial town, because there was a small settlement (more than one settler's name was King, and although they didn't found a dynasty they did suggest the most successful of several screen names I've used). There are a few historical records of human activity in Kingsport in colonial, frontier, and Civil War days but it became a real town only about a hundred years ago, when the Eastman Chemical Company and Mead Paper Mill set up factories where they could easily pollute the rivers. J.P. Stevens' cotton mill, the Kingsport Press, and a few other smaller factories moved in too. (They were attracted partly by a claim that the local labor pool was "pure Anglo-Saxon stock." Hah. Local families' pure Anglo-Saxon names were mostly translations from Irish or German. Local families with names like Williams have to look up whether their ancestor was called Williams or MacUilliam or Wilhelm. Or maybe Wilimia, because all the really old families here along "Donelson's Indian Line" had Cherokee ancestors too.) But for a good hundred years, at least, Kingsport was a Model City with everything where it logically ought to be and all within walking distance, not that most Kingsporters actually walked much. They were as car-crazy as Californians. Right up against the Virginia border was a mountainside that was nicknamed Snob Hill because the houses really were built in tiers with bigger, posher houses on every tier as you go up. People who had retired well bought those houses to grow old in, which made it a truly nice neighborhood of comfortably retired old people who looked after one another. My mother bought a house about halfway up. She wanted to "retire" from farming to a neighborhood where she could work part-time as a nurse until she needed a nurse herself, and so she did.

And then some idiot decided that what the town needed was to attract a few billionnaires, so he asked a billionnaire what to change, during the early years of this web site, and the billionnaire said, "Put in some high-rise apartments and get federal grant money for housing some welfare families from Knoxville or Chattanooga." The apartment blocks were put in at the base of Snob Hill. Around the time Mother died, Snob Hill became a scary neighborhood with addicts dying slowly, from tuberculosis and AIDS as well as sickle-cell anemia, in puddles of filth on the pavement because they've become too sick to find their way home. Gawrsh. Kingsporters don't seem to know what to do about this. They've grown up, in some cases their grandparents grew up, in a city that never had slums before. It was planned to have cheap little "starter houses" for entry-level factory laborers, but its low-income neighborhoods were always clean places. People complained about wanting more space, nicer stuff, better jobs, not about living in slums. And now they have a real slum, with homeless addicts and all. Some of them are wringing their hands and wailing "Oh, woe, we must escape to Gate City," and though they have relatives in Gate City and have always been welcome to shop and visit here, they do encounter people like me saying they ought not to want to live here. Stout hearts and true, hold fast what is yours! Many of you like the "MAGA" motto--well, make Kingsport great again. Put in better factories; give your new townsfolk, the sober ones who wanted to get out of Knoxville and make their lives better, decent jobs! That billionnaire never intended to live in Kingsport or had any loyalty to Kingsport, but you Kingsporters should have some. The world needs more fortitude.

That's a separate rant. What needs to be mentioned about Kingsport, in this blog post, is that it's a place where extraordinary cats are found--offered "free to good homes" as kittens, or allowed to stray in alleys. Listening cats. The odd jobs man in my neighborhood said recently, "Once I had a cat, a tomcat, that would do what I told him to do. Most cats aren't like that and I don't like them." Well, if you want a cat that hears and learns enough words that it can follow some simple instructions from you--you can sit or nap here, don't go there, leave my cardinals alone--Kingsport is where an unusual number of cats like that have been found. They're not a breed, in fact they're a mad mixture with different breed types, but there is a social cat community. I don't know whether Jenny or Peaches is more intelligent or social than the average cat, but I know there are confirmed cases of cats who rear kittens communally and hunt in teams being found in the Kingsport shelter.

Not that the Kingsport shelter normally wins any prizes for pet photography, because they tend to post cluttered pictures with cutesy-wutesy lettering and computer graphics instead of a good clear focus on the animal. I judge that sort of thing harshly in the photo contests. 

These photos are for sharing. Some of the Petfinder pages offer videos, also for sharing. Post them on social media. (If you're not on Bluesky yet, go to bsky.app and consider yourself invited.) 

Enough verbiage. Time for the best pale orange cat and pit bull mix dog photos in the Eastern States.

Zipcode 10101: Beanbag from New York City


Though not fat, Beanbag is a large cat--not gigantic--he weighs about twenty pounds. He was born about twelve years ago. He's an indoor cat who likes to be close to humans. In fact he's outlived a few, and changes in his humans' daily routine make him nervous. He's said to like children as long as they admire him but don't try to tickle his underside. 

Zipcode 20202: Eden and Mack from Arlington 


Eden and Mack are believed to be Maine Coon mixes like the kittens above. They were spring kittens but are the size of adult cats. They will probably grow bigger--how much bigger, you'll find out. They may be cousins but are not siblings. Like our Serena and don't-try-to-tell-her-he-wasn't-her-brother Traveller, they met at a foster home and bonded for life. They are inseparable and must be adopted together. Eden is the female--and Eden is also the orange tabby. They will not produce more kittens.

Zipcode 30303: Turtle and Yertle from Decatur


Mother (Yertle, the Tortie) and son (Turtle, the orange tabby) can be adopted separately or together. Both have been neutered. A head shot of Turtle alone was the clearest photo on the page; this photo of him with his mother is less perfect, artistically, but contains valuable information for prospective adopters. 

DOGS

To link up on Feline Fridays we have to include the cats every week. So we have to include dogs during the cats' week, too. 

Zipcode 10101: Bonnie from Texas 


Petfinder allows animals from low-traffic rural shelters to be cross-posted for adoption in cities, on the condition that the urban adopter pay for delivery. If you're actually in Texas you could skip a few steps and save some money. E-mail the shelter to find out what part of Texas she's in. Bonnie is believed to be about three years old and a sweet, friendly dog who loves to walk, run, and play ball with her human. Nobody calls anything "Bonnie" unless they believe it's both good and beautiful.

Zipcode 20202: Kya from DC 


Kya is said to be a sweet, shy, conservatve dog who takes some time adjusting to changes. Her bounce and playfulness will reappear as she gets to know you. They're begging someone, please, to adopt her before she starts thinking of a shelter as her home. She withdrew and mourned for some time after being moved to the shelter, but withdrawn and mournful are not her real personality. 

Zipcode 30303: Gretel from Atlanta 

This spring puppy, who already weighs 37 pounds, is in foster care where she gets along well with other dogs. About cats and children, they can't say. She's good at walking at heel on a leash and also likes chasing and fetching.