A question on my mind this morning was why some recent posts here have been getting so much more traffic than others. Hence the shameless self-promotion, as I revisit these posts and try to work out what made them so popular.
Celebrities, Un-American
Is Ilhan Omar un-American? I'm not sure about that. She certainly has some unpopular opinions. She probably shouldn't be in Congress. She could do a lot of actual good by leading a repatriation movement for Somalis who are no longer refugees here and aren't on the path to citizenship. Should she be forced to leave? Doubtful. Persuasion is better than force. We should be persuading Rep. Omar to persuade other Somalis to go home.
Is Elon Musk...? I don't know about that young man, I really don't. Growing up as a genius probably never was easy. It's not become easier since the idea of education for the masses became popular. I think Elon Musk has failed to think through the human consequences of some of his clever ideas, because he lacks awareness of or even a sense of species identity with duh normies. I think that's inevitable. I think it makes most brilliant thinkers (though not, reportedly, Einstein) "book smart, life stupid." I think Musk needs to work against this tendency. I think he needs to remind himself that any random HSP art student with an IQ of 110 can be revulsed by duh normies, whereas Einstein and Carver and other people of real genius made mindful efforts to practice compassion for normies they met every day. (Gates, even--though Gates seems irredeemably misguided, he's been misguided by people appealing to a practice of compassion he has tried to make.) But Musk is so valuable as an asset that, if he hadn't immigrated legally of his own free will, we should have been actively recruiting him. The last thing we want to do is boot him out of the United States in a way that would turn him against us. Even if that seems to the nasty little minds of the Democratic Socialists like revenge for the possible deportation of Ilhan Omar.
Because the Democratic Socialists really do hate America. They say it loudly and proudly, and their actions back it up. They are the ones who should be deported.
Court of Popular Opinion, the
Wallowing in judgmentalism, A.J. Christopher unintentionally supports the accusation that Patrick Clancy killed the Clancy children.
(Fact: Lindsay was alone with the children while Patrick was out shopping, being seen, being videotaped at big-chain stores that videotape store activity.
Fact: Lindsay had used drugs that not uncommonly produce a psychosis that culminates in homicide-suicide, and while some people who show this pattern of psychosis have real enemies or target strangers or co-workers, some choose the weaker members of their family for the homicide: men usually start with their womenfolks, women usually start with their children, because this type of person is a coward and, even when insane, can only imagine killing someone smaller and weaker than self.
Fact: There's a claim, based on forensic evidence, that two of the children were dead before Patrick went to the store.
Fact: Lindsay was very badly injured, possibly by her crazy self, possibly by Patrick, and has not been in whatever her right mind was since the murders. Though she may be reacting to medication rather than to any pre-existing mental illness.
Fact: Nobody claims to have eyewitnessed the murders, and Patrick's the only one who seemed confident, before this summer's media circus, that Lindsay dunnit; there are more hedonistic psychopathic men in this world than there are really violent women, even with SSRI-induced psychosis raising the number of the latter exponentially since 1980.
Fact: Patrick's not the smartest of Irish-Americans, but he's smart enough to know that Lindsay might be made to seem like a classic "killer mom" with SSRI-induced psychosis.
Fact: Patrick's "honey" has the same family name as the judge who started the media circus with the mistrial that assumed Lindsay's guilt and heard arguments only about her sanity, while Lindsay sat there, obviously stoned out of her mind, obviously belonging in a mental hospital.
Fact: We all heard Lindsay confess to the murders and plead insanity, but at the time she did that she was indisputably in an altered state of consciousness and might have been repeating something she was told to say, as it might have been by Patrick.
Fact: None of this amounts to proof beyond reasonable doubt that either Lindsay or Patrick, or both of them together for that matter, killed the Clancy children; it only means that it's not proven beyond reasonable doubt that Lindsay did.
For what it's worth, I think she did, but we will never know that beyond reasonable doubt. What we do know is that Lindsay said she wanted to be in a hospital, she clearly belongs in a hospital, and she should be in one. Probably for the rest of her short life--she doesn't look like a person who has a lot of time left in this world.)
And whenEVER a man says a woman's crazy, we KNOW the man is guilty of SOMEthing. Men need to start teaching their sons to be very hesitant and respectful about saying "I don't understand why she's saying" or "I don't agree with what she's saying, because..." Lindsay Clancy's mental illness is obvious to women, but that's not something a man would be competent to judge. Men suffer from this tendency to think with their feelings that the all-important thing is to blame someone else! They're crazy that way!
Christopher writes as if he believes Lindsay dunnit...but also as if he believes the motive for those children's murder was hedonism. If Lindsay dunnit, that would not have been the motive. The "Prozac-demented" aren't hedonists; they're miserable, probably lost, souls who believe they're either avenging or protecting others from some sort of horrible physical abuse that's produced the pain that is actually being produced by the drugs. But if Patrick dunnit, hedonism would clearly have been the motive. Patrick had every reason to want to be rid of an increasingly sick wife and live with "honey."
Music
Boogie Belgique.
Bryan Andrews. This one was written last spring, referring to deportations of drug dealers, and I call b.s. because in towns like Kingsport the law was representing the Will of the People, at least all of them that I know. Still, the song was amusing to listen to, once.
Avishai Cohen.
Jefferson Airplane.
Frenic.
America.
Popular Posts That May Actually Be Useful to Someone
I think a commenter was disappointed that my late blog buddy did not, before she died, endorse any commercially available product to get rid of nail fungus. In theory piddling on your toes in the shower would produce a mild chlorine-ammonia reaction, including a chemical compound that is highly toxic to almost anything; in practice urea and any sugar residues would feed any mold spores that survived after the vile-smelling chemical residue had been washed away. Another late blog buddy endorsed Lamisil for fungus infections; I've tried it, and it worked, but it triggered pseudo-cardiac reactions similar to the ones I've had to some sort of "pesticide" vapors.
Popular Posts That May at Least Be Making People Laugh
I thought of this one as ironic more than funny, but other people seem to be chortling.
Well...smile, anyway. This is the short fiction written from the prompt, in which things that seem unlucky keep happening and the couple they happen to are just too decent to let these things be bad luk for them/
Popular Post with Pretty Pictures
Popular Posts That May Be Feeding Local Gossip, Which I Regret, but in Some Cases It's Just Too Dang Bad
Even if my Bad Neighbor's second (or third? or fourth?) wife did find another man somewhere, she would have considered him mainly as possible help to get away from an evildoer who was poisoning his neighbors and boasting about it..."outliving" people younger than himself, indeed. He's taking advantage of my chemical sensitivities, he's taken advantage of others'. Too right that's why any woman who wanted to live would have bolted, and since the Bad Neighbor wants to keep on harassing me, let him prove he did not intentionally kill Shawn Bledsoe, professional tree trimmer and rightful heir of some land the Bad Neighbor coveted. I was in Washington when young Bledsoe fell out of a tree, dead, for no reason, when he was thirty years old. Hadn't seen the kid in years but my brother and I used to baby-sit Shawn Bledsoe. He was a healthy energetic little handful of kidness who did best with a team of baby-sitters! No reason why he should have died young.
Though I sincerely hope no person my age is bored enough yet to be trying to figure out which old school friends get (lightly) slammed in this post. My intention was to make them unidentifiable. I hold no grudges against these people. The whole middle school subset of "The Gate City Clique" were all horrible little teen-trolls in grade eight. I mean, the school system put us in a separate building where only a few unlucky teachers had to look at us. I was a spoiled brat too; some other little beast probably had a list of a hundred reasons not to like me. Let us draw the curtain of charity over questions of who was brattier than whom on any given day.
This one might have interested the wrong local people. The Feral Elberta Peach Tree is close enough to the road to be a target for drive-by sprayings. It was defoliated three times last summer, once while the last few peaches were still ripening. It was still alive--covered with buds--this morning and was just sprayed again as I was typing this. Some would say the spirit of George Peters has to be in that tree. I don't know that I believe such things, but let the sprayer beware. "Grandpa Iron Fist" didn't pick a quarrel, fire a weapon, or hit anything in every year, or every ten years; but he never lost a fight, missed a target, or left a thing he'd hit standing.
Popular Posts About Animals
Each week the link logs, new book review, and seeds-of-books-or-articles get more attention than the butterfly and Petfinder posts. Over time the butterfly and Petfinder posts get lots of views. The ones that have been up for a while show more views than the newer ones. That's cool!
Popular Posts That Are Probably Hater Bait
Some posts I can imagine as attracting lots of traffic from people who haaaate what I've said. Blogspot is not inherently more immune to pressure from haters than Twitter/X is...but Blogspot can learn from those sites' big mistakes. I stand by what I said. Blogspot should stand by my right to say it.
Popular Posts That Celebrate Other People's Popular Work
Some blog posts' popularity is obviously due to their discussions of books, movies, etc., that lots of people already liked.
Why is this one more popular than other music link logs? It's shorter but most of the songs in it were super-sellers at some time...Note that although Google has moved rerun book reviews to where they were reposted, Google has not changed the original publication date in the URL's.
Popular Post\ That Publicized a Book by Bashing It
Popular Posts the Reason for Whose Popularity Is Unclear
Really good music links? Maybe!
Was it the timely PSA?
How popular is Natasha Bedingfield?
Do people like V.L. Giles' full-length books, then?
