Status Update: How Bad Is Yougov?

As the first real heat wave breaks over the Cat Sanctuary...

So many days I looked at the kitten Dora and thought "She's not going to live. Heavy-duty medication for internal parasites might help her but she's not going to grow big enough to take it."

So many days, after that sort of morning, Dora was still bubbling and squeaking and bouncing about with big brother Diego at the end of the day. There was something special about those two. All healthy kittens just like to play with anything and anybody, but Diego seemed to notice that as the biggest kitten in the litter he was the one the smallest kitten trailed after, raced, chased, tried to copy, tried to out-wrestle. He seemed to be careful about playing with Dora. If their other brothers wanted to play more roughly than he did, he'd show them the rough stuff. Dora would stay in a game--chasing a stick, e.g.--up to the limit of her strength. Sometimes she walked away from a game with me. I never saw her walk away from a game with Diego.

So on Saturday morning, when Dora woke up bright and early, bounced out of her box in the office without waiting to be carried, and rushed out to do her part to keep her aunt Silver's lactation cycle going, I expected she'd rush up with the three tomkittens when the kibble was put out for breakfast. Right?

Wrong. 

The Professional Bad Neighbor drove up and sprayed poison somewhere. Sheer spite; he has to know by now that John Hinckley might have a better chance of getting a real estate deal around here than he would. I sneezed for a few minutes. When the time came to go out and dispense kibble, the tomkittens' eyes were watery, the mother cat Pastel looked bleary-eyed too, and Dora was nowhere to be found. I called her, specifically. Dora didn't always actually come when called but she did always notice being called. But surely she wanted breakfast? I called her again, and Serena, my non-demonstrative cat, came out and jumped onto my shoulder and purred and licked me. Then she jumped onto my knees and purred and cuddled. She even chomped my hand a few times in the friendly way she did when she was the office kitten, before she grew up and decided chomping humans was not a game worth playing.

She knew.

There are still a few Vespulas on the porch. The trouble with squirting alcohol and Listerine, instead of spraying poison, is that although you can saturate fungi with Listerine you have to kill insects by ones. There never were many on the porch and, when I see that they no longer even post guards around what they were starting to make a nest, I keep hoping that they've decided to move somewhere else. Even for wasps the Vespulas seem stubborn and stupid, though. I keep squirting and thinking that, although they seem to have been introduced to our ecosystem at the same time as two other unwanted species that might have moved in from other parts of the neighborhood, at least they do seem to be making a dent in the mosquito population.

What has this to do with Yougov? Hopefully I say, nothing at all. It is to be hoped that the things that made last week unpleasant are separate and discrete inconveniences. But it can be hard to tell. It remains to be learned whether the Bad Neighbor's pranks are just free-floating malice--he was one nasty little brat of a boy who's grown up to be a nasty brat of an old man--or are associated with any other haters' ill will toward me personally.

I've often posted about Yougov, the survey site. Always before I've posted good things. Good things can be used for bad purposes.

Yougov has a very good reputation--in the United States, anyway. (I've read that some of its foreign branches had bad reputations.) They don't send out spam or sell your address to spammers. They pay what and when they say they'll pay for the time you spend taking surveys. They deliver good, representative cross-sections for market surveys, product (including celebrity-image-as-product) ratings, and opinion polls. 

An election year naturally generates lots of opinion polls.

This year I've noticed a problem with the election-related polls. "To verify that you are a registered US voter," the survey authors whine, "what is the address where you are registered to vote?" Why are no warning bells going off in Yougov's office? They don't need to verify that people are registered voters. They want to know where people are registered to vote in order to manipulate election results. This can be done by legitimate means, like selecting campaign ads, press releases, and news broadcasts to appeal to the interests of voters in different districts. Or it can be done by less ethical means, like mailing out disinformation about where and how to vote, or sabotaging digital voting machines...or physically interfering with people's being able to vote.

I think Yougov needs a policy requiring that only office, school, post office or other mail drop addresses should ever be allowed on surveys. If people don't have a place to receive mail that is far from where they live, they should program their computers to remove anything that's not recognized as a workplace or post office address from the system, perhaps replacing it with a line like "Never type anyone's home address into a computer." That's a basic common-sense precaution, like "Roll up windows, lock doors, and find another place to leave children or pets, when you step out of the car." 

And they need one reminding their clients: "Any attempt to identify individual voters, such as asking even for a post office address that might be associated with voter registration information, will be reported to the police as evidence of possible involvement in election tampering and/or voter harassment."

("No such!" a client will wail. Truthfully or truthily. "All we want to do is talk to the swing voters and make sure they know what Our Candidate has done about the issues A, B, C, and D..." There used to be a place to do that in a perfectly legitimate, ethical, even mutually enjoyable way. Twitter used to be its name...before censorship. We badly need uncensored social media where people can chat and debate about whatever interests them, on their own time, in real time. Meanwhile, the crucial thing you must not do, if you want to communicate with people, is try to get information about them before you have given them--and verified that they were interested in having--the same information about you.)

Following the attempt to murder a campaigning candidate last week, I think Yougov needs to tighten the restrictions on questions that can be asked on election-related surveys. No, you don't need to know whether surveys are being taken by registered voters. Deal with it. The ones being taken by children are at least being taken by people who talk to voters. It is better to work with information that might be provided by children than it is to have information that might be used by someone who wanted to murder a candidate or his supporters.

"But it can only hurt 'conservatives' if mature property owners, who are presumably all 'conservative,' are allowing surveys to be filled in by their illegal Mexican housekeepers, who..."

Basta ya! In the first place I do not have a housekeeper, Mexican or otherwise, but if I did she would be legally authorized to work in the United States. And she would probably be a radical Christian, and we'd probably have talked about the religious reasons to support some causes the "conservatives" try to claim, and some the "liberals" do. And whether she was a legal temporary resident, as it might be a student, or a natural-born citizen of Virginia, I'd encourage her to use or acquire a legal right to vote. It's a vicious and outdated stereotype that anybody in any demographic group intentionally depends on cheap illegal foreign labor. Most of the mature property owners I know don't hire housekeepers until we acquire a disability that qualifies for a pension. Then they hire US taxpayers with, if anything, a preference for young relatives of people who want to go all the way back to Grover Cleveland and say the federal government shouldn't do pensions. Or else the really pathetic ones prefer to hire people who look like the types they used to want to date. 

In any case a criterion for any housekeeper I hire is that she must be able to explain why raising the minimum wage is likely to hurt her more than me. She's free to vote for whichever presidential candidate she thinks is most likely to avoid war, no questions asked, but she needs to be immunized to that specific political lie.

Anyway, back in June I was "selected for a survey" purportedly about how people read and react to different kinds of tweets on Twitter.The survey claimed to need access to my Twitter account to assemble a selection of "fake tweets," several of which I recognized as old tweets, from people I follow or used to follow. 

If I'd had my wits about me I would have said no, right there, because that amounted to authorizing a stranger to impersonate me. For all I know the person may be a scammer and may be using my Twitter identity to ask my Tweeps for money. Some poor idjit, undoubtedly the son of one of the legendary Nigerian scammers though I don't know whether he's still in Nigeria, has been using the name "Elon Musk" to try to ask me for money. I should probably report him but he is such a laugh...

But at the time I thought, well, none of us use Twitter much any more anyway....

So this survey proceeded to show me old tweets from individuals I followed for more than an hour. Since the contents of most of these tweets were clearly news stories from bygone months or years, and the survey said that whatever respondents "liked" or "retweeted" would show up on our Twitter pages, I made sure to pick only pictures, jokes, or quotes that hadn't gone out of date. People who followed me on Twitter used to know they could expect to see pretty flower pictures, no matter whose flowers or when they had bloomed.

Then the survey switched to a selection of old tweets from corporations I used to follow. Aye, there's the rub. The corporate accounts I followed were cut down, first, a few years ago, to newspapers and the BBC. Then after the "Trusted News Initiative" I cut out them, too. So the survey was picking old news stories from newspapers. Oy. It might have taken all night for newspaper accounts to have posted a half-dozen tweets that hadn't gone out of date. Newspapers do occasionally post an evergreen article about "How to Clean Behind the Refrigerator to Keep the Refrigerator Working Longer" or "Bird Species That Are Occasional Visitors to Local Parks," but I kept scrolling past tweet after tweet about stories that were no longer news. "Where to View the Solar Eclipse," for pity's sake. I might have retweeted that if the system had allowed me to type in a comment like "The story's old but the picture's still cool," but it didn't.

I started scrolling down whole screens full of tweets I was not about to retweet. There had to be an end somewhere. I started taking the survey at nine or ten o'clock and it was well past midnight when I finally pulled up something other than unusable tweets about no-longer-news stories. It was a sarcastic demand that I prove I was still human. In all that time I suppose some people might have been able to program a bot to scroll through the fake tweets for them. 

Then the survey closed. Say whaaat? Yougov surveys are worth a predetermined number of points that add up toward giftcards or, if you do online banking, deposits into banks. This was supposed to have been the one that paid for my next yarn shopping spree/ It hadn't even added the points to my account!

I sent Yougov a strongly worded e-mail, that night, and got on with my life. I received no reply from a human at Yougov. Over the next two or three weeks I took a few more surveys and clicked through a few screens to request a giftcard. The system was set up to encourage people to request digital e-cards. I don't buy things online, so I sent them another e-mail requesting that they just put the card in the mail as they've always done before, and mentioning that this would be a good time to add a substantial payment for the bogus survey. 

That got a human reply. "What survey was that? When?"

Since I'd e-mailed Yougov from within their system I didn't even have the copy of the e-mail I sent them. More to the point, at midday today, was that it had taken from 7 a.m. to midday for their e-mail to open because my Internet connection seems about two-thirds dead. It has ever since that storm, a week ago last Friday. By last Friday I'd checked the company web site for an explanation of why it was taking them so long to restore full connectivity. The company site gave no indication that they were aware of a problem. Whole towns lost connection for a day or two after the storm, which was understandable, but apparently during the week everyone else's connection had been restores except mine.

Mine is still failing to open the regular Windows "network & internet access" screen, just flashing a condescending little warble about how the company "tested and verified that you are able to access some web sites." Some web sites. Right. Enough for the copy editing job, which is what I've been doing with most of my online time during the past week, but not enough for serious research, not enough for listening to the "vlogs" of various blind bloggers on my list, not enough to get e-mails open within one hour...

And so it inevitably occurred to me that there might be a reason for this.

I can think of more probable reasons. I can think of trees with limbs that I've been telling company employees they needed to prune for many years. The first limb I'd cut, just to test this theory, if I were a young man with a truck equipped with a lift and provisioned with saws and suchlike, is on a walnut tree just below the house, above the road, easy to reach from a lift mounted on a truck and just about impossible to reach from the ground. Then I would follow the line and prune the others. 

I can think of a Professional Bad Neighbor who may or may not have bothered wiretapping either the old telephone line or the Internet connection line, but certainly had both means and motives. I've reported the sounds of suspected trespassing to the police before. 

But until one of those possibilities is confirmed, and I emphasize that I hope it's just a tree limb or two that the young men can get rid of in an hour or two, I can't rule out the possibility that someone who wasted so much of my time worming about in my Twitter account might have been hostile enough to have traced the Internet connection to the house, also. For the purpose of interfering with my vote.

I like Yougov. I've liked Yougov for a long time. I don't like thinking that they're to blame for anything worse than attracting boring surveys. (:Which of these brands have you ever bought?" "None of them. I don't buy that kind of thing. I don't hang out with people who do." "Which of these brands do you have a good impression of?" "Aaarrrggghhh." The kind of thing that must be expected if you eke out an Internet writer's pathetic income by taking surveys online.) 

I still think Yougov need to be reminded of the potential danger to them in allowing clients to snoop into the identities, locations, ages, of survey respondents. I want them to think long and hard about the possibility that they've allowed people with criminal intentions to find out where I live, and then I want them to redesign their system so that, if a client tries to sneak in a question like "What is your date of birth?" in a survey, the computer flashes red for thirty seconds and then displays a message like "You may not attempt to identify individuals taking these surveys. You are allowed to ask in which decade respondents were born."

Or they could simply say, "For any question you ask the respondent, the respondent is entitled to a verified answer to that question by you. So, if you ask for anyone's address, your real name and home address must be displayed in full-sized type above the quesdtion." That tends to motivate people to withdraw any inappropriate questions, online, in a hurry. 

Link Log from a Week of Half Service

It's amusing, actually. Pages won't open. Videos won't play. The button at the bottom of the screen shows full connection, but not for the private account for which sponsors are paying; only for "SCTC Wireless." It pulls up a menu for "Troubleshoot options" or "Open Network & Internet Settings." The button to open the regular "Network & Internet Settings" page does nothing at all. The button to "Troubleshoot options" pulls up a whine: "Windows tested your Internet connection and verified that you are able to access some web sites." Some, yes. Trouble is, the people paying for private connections (who I have always said should be paying entrepreneurs to manage public-access computer centers for profit) are paying for full access to any and all web sites, at any time, more than one at a time, specifically for allowing the long videos some blind and/or lazy people post to natter along in the background while we run down our to-do list of things to do with other web sites. 

Our social connections demand this, SCTC Wireless. They may expect us to reinforce their initial perception that some of these news-and-views videos are misguided, but the information from those videos, whether accepted or refuted or questioned, will be on the test of our having paid due attention to what they posted. There are a terrible lot of videos on the Internet that it's easy, probably profitable, and certainly fun, to ignore...and then there are the ones that allow normal blind people the sort of social connection George Peters was able to sustain through a terrific, even monomaniac, concentration on his cassette tapes. No, I don't "ghost" away from e-friends because they lose the ability to type. My e-friends who can type don't do that, either. 

You need to restore 100% connectivity, SCTC Wireless. You need to explain, on your customers' next monthly statements, why you disabled the sound systems built into people's computers and why, as a result, the charge for their Internet service is half or less than half what it would normally be. We know there was a thunderstorm on Friday. We know that there was some rain and lots of humidity during the past week. Those facts have their natural consequences but there's a limit to everything. Nobody should pay as much as half of the normal monthly bill for this July. 

Anyway, from some web sites, some links...and a Palinode.

Animals (the Palinode) 

Last month we had some sort of animal crisis. I'm still not sure exactly what happened. Dasher, a possum distinguished from all others by his preference to gallop rather than walk, disappeared. Some animal died in among the loose rocks below the road. My cat Silver lost her kittens and had a stiff, sore, badly swollen paw. Was it possible that Dasher had threatened the kittens and Silver had killed him? 

It was possible. I think Dasher weighs more than Silver, and runs about as fast, but she's an intelligent animal and he's a dumb one. It did not, however, happen. Dasher moved away from his residence behind the cats' sand pit in the cellar, but he's still living. Drabble, who looks like him only smaller and with a more typical possum gait, didn't move into the cellar either, although she's been fulfilling the duties of the resident possum. 

The Vespula menace? When I inadvertently touched the place where a small group of belligerent bee-sized wasps were camping, very early Wednesday morning, it was complete news to me that Vespulas lived in my part of the world. I grew up using the word "yellowjacket" to refer to a different animal. But I asked someone from a different neighborhood, two or three miles away, and got a quick summary of what I'd just learned about the genus Vespula. I remembered, also, a neighbor who said there were good bees that live in hives and make honey, and bad bees that live in the ground and only buzz and sting. So, the Vespulas are not common to my part of the world in the way bees or paper wasps are, but they have been found here before.

Meanwhile, Serena-cat nonverbally told me, she'd known about our Vespulas before I did, and though cats get some protection from their fur, insect stings hurt cats too. 

"Is that what happened to Silver's paw?!"

Silver nonverbally said it was. 

The cats did not offer any indication of whether it had been the Vespulas, or the skunk, that motivated the possums to avoid the cellar. The skunk had not sprayed the cellar. Dasher dislikes this skunk more than any previous resident possum ever seemed to dislike any previous resident skunk, anyway. 

I now think it's possible that the Vespulas on the porch are the remnant of a larger group that were in the cellar. They may have made their way to the porch as stragglers from a colony that was nearly wiped out by a skunk, guided there directly by the Evil Principle alone for all I know. If so they would have got here right at the same time with a population of biting flies we hadn't had before, and a red wasp population explosion.

There is no way of knowing who died among the rocks below the road. It was a small animal. I found three non-viable kittens in the house; cats usually have four. It is possible that Silver's original injury came from killing Vespulas; her paw showed tooth marks but I saw her bite it a few times after first noticing the swelling, as if she were trying to drain the inflammation.  Apart from the bite marks the inflammation behaved like a worst-case Vespula sting, in which repeated stings and/or different wasps aggravated what looked like one very bad wound.

"Did a man dump those insects in the cellar?"

They didn't seem to know. They wouldn't. Sommersburr used to speak to the Professional Bad Neighbor, but female cats, who know they'd be missed, don't do that sort of pointless and dangerous thing. They hide from trespassers.

Math

One of the great advantages of being from Virginia is, or used to be, that in grade five Virginia schools taught everyone that, if you must "estimate" or "round" numbers, you should always round up if the digit dropped is 5 or greater than 5. This makes estimates more accurate. "A dollar fifty-nine" is not the same as $1.50. To avoid surprises at checkout counters, it's better to think of "a dollar fifty-nine" as closer to $2.00.

https://www.ablemuse.com/v7/poetry/john-milbury-steen/nines

Poetry

I'm not sure where this poet is reminiscing about but I do think I know why she still dreams of and misses a place, and time, in which she vividly remembers unpleasant things. Because the good things about that place and time need to be preserved, that's why. Because nobody misses the flies that bred in the old outhouse but nobody misses the stench when people use water-flush toilets right inside the house, either, and nobody who has the option of burning biomass and getting some use out of it would ever miss the idea of all those water-flush toilets dumping all that (wasted fuel) into rivers from which people in Tennessee get their drinking water, either. By remembering what was good about the past and working to preserve and restore that, we can make tremendous improvements on our present situations. 

Houses should be separated by an acre or two of woodlot; in some places that means white pines. You can't blame anyone who has to look at someone else's house, every time person opens a window, for pining for those pines.

https://www.ablemuse.com/v6/poetry/cornelia-snider-yarrington/breeding-grounds

Politics (Election 2024)

James Carville has been one of his party's more intelligent spox for a long time now. Matt Margolis has some pungent comments on his recent writing:

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/07/11/james-carville-goes-nuclear-on-biden-n4930589

Y'know, in real life, I seriously considered circulating petitions to get Robert Kennedy onto the ballot as an Independent in Virginia. I've said I'd vote for our man, if only as a symbolic, some would say a wasted, vote for Glyphosate Awareness. I will, too, if Trump doesn't come forward with a specific apology for having promoted the use of glyphosate and a solid commitment to ending the same. As in, "If I am elected in 2024, farmers will be able to get some compensation for destroying existing supplies of glyphosate during February 2025, the use of any other 'pesticides' will be reduced by half in the summer of 2025, and spraying 'pesticides' will be recognized as a violent crime against persons in 2026." But I'd really rather see the Ds' best moderate on the ticket in every state, as a Democrat with a chance of actually winning. 

Nobody identified with an administration remembered for high inflation, wrecked local economies, censorship, any kind of vaccine mandates even if the vax in question weren't remembered as "clot-shots," and the threat of drafting girls as well as boys into another foreign war, is likely to beat a former president whose administration is remembered for economic revival. Biden can't beat Trump; Harris can't beat Trump; Clinton can't beat Trump; Michelle Obama can't beat Trump; if any younger White men still identify with the Party of Vindictive Discrimimation Against White Men, they're not likely to beat Trump either. If he stays with his moderate bipartisan fact-focussed base, Kennedy can beat Trump. If his party let him stay with his base while in office, he can beat Trump twice.

Like Shopping?

This week's Long & Short Reviews question was whether reviewers like or dislike shopping. 

I don't dislike shopping but I like a lot of other things better. I never really was the sort of girl whose idea of an afternoon's entertainment was to hang out on the mall.

I'm more likely to enjoy necessary shopping when it can be done in aid of a good cause. I don't get high on the formaldehyde odor of "new," although I don't notice any positive symptoms after exposure, as Grandma Bonnie Peters used to do, and I don't think "new" things smell nasty, as she did. (GBP once quit a job when someone put in a new carpet.) I do like the way you never know exactly what you'll find at a charity store. 

Some of the things you find at charity stores are unused end-of-season stuff from department stores, still sealed in plastic. I don't like the idea of wearing other people's shoes or underwear, but I have found shiny new shoes and underwear in charity stores. Likewise shiny new toiletries. If you really need shoes, underwear, soap, a toothbrush, etc., Murphy's Law dictates that the day you got to the store would be the day they'd sold the ones you could use...so thriftshopping teaches us to buy things in advance of need and stockpile a bit. 

Still, how much I like shopping depends on how much more I like the other alternatives available.

Today, for example, would be a good day to go shopping.

Start with the Internet connection still being feeble so that, for example, instead of showing whatever the weather's doing at the weather station, the computer has been telling me it was 84 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy for the past six days. 

Add to that the way, in real life, the temperature even at the Cat Sanctuary has been above 84 degrees Fahrenheit before midday for most of those days.

Add to that the way, last night, after eating about a tablespoonful of pepitas that had been soaked in chicken broth so that she actually ate them with relish, Dora-kitten reacted like someone who has a serious problem with internal parasites. The seeds of plants in the cucurbit family are full of essential minerals that nourish large animals and kill any internal parasites they may have. For most of us this is not a problem. It's like getting Vitamin C shock from eating three oranges. You might or might not notice anything happening, and if you did it wouldn't be painful. When people who've been malnourished eat lots of Vitamin C they wail, and when people who've been carrying around a lot of internal parasites suddenly manage to kill several parasites at  once, they may feel uncomfortable too. 

So Dora rushed out of the office, but she didn't make it all the way to the sand pit. There was a horrible little puddle on the porch.

So then, while cleaning the porch, I rested my hand against some things I'd stacked up on the porch for storage, and something stung my finger. Something large, going by the feel--a European Hornet? I said, "Ouch," with great feeling, and then I said, "I beg your pardon, Friend Wasp," and turned the flashlight beam to see if she was still there. 

It was not a large wasp. It was a mob of horrible little things that looked like melanistic bees.

I went in and Googled them. Google said they were yellowjackets--one of a few very similar-looking, yet apparently distinct, species in the genus Vespula..

Say whaaat? I'm familiar with the large ground-nesting wasps that people I know call yellowjackets. They're not a great deal bigger than paper wasps, maybe 12mm instead of 9mm, but they make up for it in unlovableness. Paper wasps are generally peaceable animals who don't deserve their bad reputation; most of them will sting if they feel threatened, and some pack a load of venom, but their motive for approaching humans is usually to protect us from gnats or mosquitoes. Paper wasps aren't really very intelligent about solving problems, they just have awesome instincts, but they do have enough sense to recognize friends. They can be good friends to have. But the yellow wasps my friends and family know as yellowjackets just loll about in orchards, waiting for fruit to be damaged, and get drunk on fermenting fruit juice and pick fights with everybody. 

These little things had nothing in common with the yellowjackets I've always known except for their venom. The Pennsylvania science site said that, although they make themselves very unpleasant in Pennsylvania, the Vespulas earn their keep by eating nuisance insects. Considering that they're less than a quarter the size of our yellowjackets, their ability to deliver almost an equal amount of pain astonished me. Well, for one thing, at least three of them must have stung my finger at the same time to produce the sensation of having touched a large wasp. 

Google said I could try applying baking soda to the sting, or else vinegar, which suggested that neither treatment does much good. The pain, sources seemed to agree, would peak in about two hours; the swelling, in about two days. Ice, cold water, or elevating the hand might reduce the swelling. This was fine helpful information in a house without a refrigerator, I growled, and lay down to try elevating the injured hand. If I hadn't been stung I might have felt sleepy, it being four o'clock in the morning, but as things were lying down called my attention to what promised to be a very long list of things I could do without--prickly heat, and reactions to the poison in the air, and frustration with the way the feeble Internet connection refused to move from one Petfinder page to another...

...and the question of where these Vespulas, who are more black than yellow and are less logically entitled to the name "yellowjackets" than the animals I've always called that, had come from. It was not as if they were local animals that might have come to the porch during the night because their home had been flooded, or raided by a skunk. They're not local. If I'd ever seen anything that looked like really belligerent bees, growing up during the panic about the "killer" or "bravo" or "African" bees, I would have remembered. I never have. Insects migrate, but why would a ground-nesting species choose a crack in between stored objects that I move and the cats climb over every few days, when there's so much soft, well-drained soil to burrow into? 

I have a Professional Bad Neighbor who wants to motivate people to move away and sell land cheap. He's admitted this. He's been harassing people for years, getting away with stupid pranks because nobody believes a grown-up employed man would do them until they hear him admit it. His latest stupid prank of which I was aware was putting ants' eggs in people's mailboxes and mixing up their mail. The ants, which were a biting species, would hatch as the metal mailboxes warmed up in the morning sun, then die as the metal continued to warm in the afternoon sun. A lot of the Bad Neighbor's other pranks have involved cruelty to animals.

These things that people in other places call yellowjackets are not native to my part of the world. They are common, per Google, in Pennsylvania and other Eastern States. Had they been shipped on ice from the same place as the ants' eggs? 

The sun came up. I got up. I opted for a benign first strike, tucking a mothball into the crevice immediately above the Vespulas. Maybe making sure they were all dead would be the public-spirited thing, but I figured that if the Vespulas moved off the porch the skunk would probably like them. Google said skunks, and also raccoons, bears, moles, and shrews, enjoy Vespulas as much as they do our larger but lazier ground-nesting wasps. So: mothball. The Vespulas immediately started buzzing and flying about. Some of them flew in my direction. I went back inside. 

There are other things to do about wasps if you don't want to try making friends with them, which I figure is a lost cause with these Vespulas. Not spraying poison vapor into the air doesn't mean we can't squirt harmless things that kill on contact. Boiling water or steam kills a lot of things without doing a bit of harm to other things right beside them. Alcohol kills insects on contact, if you get enough coverage. Listerine, which I've used to clean some of those stored items in the past, also kills many small animals on contact. Water, alcohol, and the herbal oils in Listerine, are all natural substances that don't normally harm large animals. Liquid soap, mosquito repellent, and various cosmetics that are squirted out of non-aerosol bottles onto hair or skin...might release some chemical vapors into the air others have to breathe, so I'm not recommending them or saying I plan to use them. I'd rather just let the Vespulas go off somewhere where the skunk can enjoy them in peace.

I don't know whether Vespulas are intelligent enough to make friends with humans. Paper wasps, hornets, and mud-dauber wasps are. Bees are. What I've learned from living with those animals is that they bond with humans, or else they do not, on first meeting. When they buzz around you and make threat displays, like sitting on your arm and grooming their stingers, they're forming their judgment of what kind of animal you are. Remain calm, and they decide you're a peaceable animal that belongs in their territory, and become friends. They will protect you from nuisance insects. They may even protect you from in-laws or Jehovah's Witnesses, if they perceive that those things are disrupting the peace in their territory. 

Do they ever sting? Yes. It doesn't happen every year. The wasps in my part of the world have a lot to teach the humans about peace, as do the spiders. Once in two or three years I carelessly crush somebody, and the animal naturally enough lets me know what I've done while it struggles to save itself. Can it be blamed?  

I don't mind living with friendly wasps who have the ability to sting, any more than I mind living with cats who can scratch, dogs who can bite, or humans who can sue. (Many of the humans I know also carry firearms, but what you need to be mindful about is that they can sue.) The wasps have enough sense to know that I don't intend to provoke any unpleasantness, just as the cats, the dogs, and the humans do. 

Unfortunately my experience has been that, if your first encounter with a wasp goes wrong, it will not be a friendly wasp. I'm not willing to try making friends with the Vespulas. 

At this particular moment I'm giving them time to notice that the mothball is not going away, and find somewhere to go, before escalating to deadly force. I am trapped in the office, held hostage by a few dozen angry, dumb animals about the size of my little fingernail. The cats aren't pleased because it's past time for me to set out kibble and cold water for them. The air in the office is sweltering. The air outside is building up to another thunderstorm. The Internet is still...not running...not even seeping...more like dripping, drop by drop. 

This would be a good day to do some shopping, actually. If someone would drive up with a ladder I'd climb out the window and go to the mall.

Petfinder Post: Kitten Day

This week, various Internet groups observe "Kitten Day."

Did anyone need another reason to celebrate kittens? Don't they do a good enough job of celebrating themselves?

Today was also the first day when even the Cat Sanctuary, back in the cool green woods, logged 90-degree heat and 90-percent humidity. 

If anyone felt inclined to celebrate anything, they celebrated by drinking extra water and staying deep in the cellar. During the transfer of duties the cats reclaimed the cellar from Dasher Possum and installed Drab in a burrow in the orchard. 

There is still a lot of poisonous vapor hanging in the motionless air. Dora the Explorer had an opportunity to spend most of the night outdoors with her very devoted aunt Silver. She nonverbally said she liked staying out like a grown-up cat, but blood was dripping out the corner of her eye. ""Why is everyone looking so gloomy today?" she said. "It's only my stupid sinuses draining as usual. I can see! I can bounce and pounce like a normal kitten."

"It's good to see you're feeling bouncy," I said, "but I don't think you are a normal kitten. Over and above your chemical sensitivity, I think you may also have worms. Your stomach looks stuffed and puffed even when you've not been eating, and you're still growing very slowly. You're hardly half the size of Diego."

"Every kitten I've ever seen is smaller than Diego," Dora nonverbally said. "Anyway, I am his loyal sister. The last time you tried picking out cinnamon vines around the hibiscus bush, Diego decided to defend the vines from you. Now Diego is lolling under the porch and I say you shall not pull up his cinnamon vines."

"And I say you shall roll down the hill," I said, picking out vines with one hand and rolling Dora over with the other hand.

"Everybody is bigger than I am now," said Dora calmly, "but one day I shall rule with an iron paw! Why do you pull up cinnamon vines?"

"To stop them pulling down the Rose of Sharon of course," I said. "It's about the only flower in the not-a-lawn you lot haven't pulled down."

"We like to bend it over, let it spring back, and see if anything interesting flies out," Dora explained. "Once a cicada fell out. That was fun! We keep hoping for another cicada but, so far, all we've found are hibiscus leaf caterpillars."

"Shaking them out is good," I said. "Summer is almost over! Hear the katydids up in the orchard!"

"Does 'summer is almost over' mean the weather will be cooler again?"

"Yes," I said, "and on a day like this one that's about the best news I can think of."

"Kittens like it warm," Dora nonverbally reminded me, "although too much is too much of anything."

"Some good news especially for you," I said, "is that we have pepitas. You are going to have pepitas in chicken broth tonight. And if the e-mail is working, I am going to e-mail the vet about medicine to get rid of any worms that remain after you've eaten the pepitas."

A kitten is a very small animal. In a state of nature the odds are against its surviving. Even if it lives with humans its prospects for the first year are still touch-and-go. If it were a more rational creature, a kitten might not find so much fun in life. But it's a baby, full of growth hormones and life energy, and it always seems to be having fun, in one way or another. Pulling down flowers...chasing its siblings...throwing a twig in the air and catching it...pulling a toy to pieces...curling up against you for a nap....

Everybody really needs a kitten or a puppy in their life. Unfortunately some kittens and puppies are born in the custody of people who do not know this. Here are some very adorable and adoptable kittens. They need homes to bring fun and silliness and life energy into. Please share their photos and links with anyone you know who might know someone who needs a kitten. 

Next week we'll look at puppies. 

Zipcode 10101: Sylvie & Arthur from New York City 

If you don't see the picture, click the link. Some piece of the local Internet was fried in last week's storm and it's taken three days just to get three Petfinder pages opened. It's too hot for me to keep trying to paste in pictures and waiting to see if they've pasted properly. I think we need a law that web sites have to paste things in when we type CTRL-V or else pay a fine for wasting our time, but meanwhile, you'll see the picture I had in mind, and one more, at the link.

Her web page https://www.petfinder.com/cat/sylvie-72333848/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/\

This matched pair of siblings do everything together and must be adopted together. They are true "Jellicle Cats"...

"Jellicle Cats are white and black,

Jellicle Cats (as I said) are small,

Jellicles jump like a jumping-jack..."

Black kittens with some white below are stereotypically bouncy and playful, clever, affectionate, and loyal to their humans. It's too early to say much about Sylvie and Arthur except that they were born in March, are just old enough to be on their own, and may act clingy or regressive for the first day or two as they settle in. They'll grow up fast.

Zipcode 20202: Dakota from DC 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/dakota-71887479/dc/washington/lailas-legacy-animal-rescue-dc31/

Two sisters have web pages of their own. Dakota won the cute photo prize, no contest. Click on her web link if you're not seeing another adorable Jellicle Cat type face. Dakota has patches of black fur, white fur, and a heather mix that manages not to fade to gray. Spring kittens, the sisters spend lots of time playing, either wrestling, chasing each other, or snuggling up together for a nap. They have been in a "foster home" with other cats and dogs, and get along with the other animals while giving most of their attention to each other and their humans. 

It's nice that in English "Dakota" also means a place and/or a car, because the people who call themselves Dakota think it's ridiculous for an individual name. It's a collective form. It's like being called "Frenchmen" instead of "Francis," or "Americans" instead of "Georgia." If a human named Dakota learned to speak the Dakota language, person would want a different name. But in English we can think of it as more like being called "Dallas" or "Brittany."

Zipcode 30303: George & Miffy from Atlanta 

His web page:https://www.petfinder.com/cat/george-bonded-w-miffy-72275802/ga/atlanta/little-lives-animal-rescue-ga1105/

They have two separate web pages for one story. These siblings were rescued from an abusive human when they were tiny. They have been "declawed." They must be total indoor pets. The good news is that they've been in a more humane foster home and have learned to enjoy being indoor pets. They play together when they're left alone, squeak for attention when their human comes in, snuggle up and purr themselves to sleep. Black and white cats are sometimes stereotyped as the friendliest, purriest, cuddliest color type and George and Miffy seem to have been consistently encouraged to act the perfect stereotype. They must be adopted together.

No mention was made of whether these "declawed" kittens have lingering pains in their paws, but one shelter did say that they can't guarantee cats being housebroken. Nearly all cats naturally housebreak themselves whether they ever come inside the house or not. They don't like filth either. The question is whether they prefer a sand pit, a litter box, to wrap everything messy in a shopping bag, or to straddle a toilet seat and get rid of waste material the way humans do. However, about this time a few summers ago, our Silver cat's siblings were adopted at a very early age. I advised against it, but the adopters insisted that the kittens were needed to cheer up an eighty-year-old cancer patient who had no time to wait. So the kittens found themselves in a new place about fifty miles from their home, and although they already knew that Serena and I did not want to look at the evidence that they had learned how to excrete all by themselves, they apparently thought the patient needed to see that. Maybe they didn't like a commercial litter box. Maybe they were hoping that if they misbehaved they'd be sent home. The good news is that kittens don't like a dirty environment, so the "See what I can do!" phase rarely lasts more than 24 hours. The more promptly a litter box is scooped, the better they will like using it.

Web Log for the Holiday Weekend

On Friday I was trying to put together a few links to post on Sunday, when Chrome started running very very slowly. At first the other browsers seemed to do a little better, except that I didn't give the other browsers inside access to Blogspot. Then the storm broke and the whole Internet went down. On Saturday Gate City had limited Internet access--one or two tabs at a time would open, but no audio, no video, and only a few small pictures could be seen. Duffield, I'm told, had no access at all. Connections continued to be very feeble all weekend. Nature intended people to visit their relatives, go to the lake, watch fireworks, that sort of thing. Nature sort of forced some of us to do those things. From time to time I'd pass by an Internet connection and check it. As of Sunday night the Internet is still running at about ten percent power.

On Friday Blogspot was one of the tabs that wouldn't open. I had enough tabs open to confirm a pattern: simple things, like blog posts and short articles that contained text only, would open; pages that contained a lot of coding, like the inside of Blogspot and like any page with big pictures or audiovisual content, would not. I was able to work on a copy-editing gig, with breaks to read poems and short simple blog posts, but not visit fora, or listen to music, or do research. By Sunday evening, Blogspot is opening but not running smoothly. So, well, a few links anyway. Regular posts will resume...I can't say when. I am aware of obligations to sponsors and readers, but serious heat and humidity are here, my neighborhood's been poisoned, and my Internet connection's been fried. I have opened the tabs for the next butterfly post but the server's not actually connecting to most of them, so even that's being delayed. Indefinitely. I will do that, and likewise some long-awaited (at least by some writers and publishers) new book reviews, when I can. There will be a Petfinder post but it may not be Tuesday. There will be Long & Short Reviews and Poets & Storytellers United posts but they may not be linked up, and may not appear on their regular schedule. 

I have to figure...McDonald's has its own server and may have a stronger connection, this week, but every computer person in Duffield is likely to be at McDonald's. If I can do some online work closer to home, going to McDonald's and taking up bandwidth that Duffielders need would be cheating. 

Food 

Simple recipes for baked desserts, with funny stories: 

https://barbtaub.com/2024/07/03/did-you-get-your-cooking-badge-humor-cooking-recipe/

I don't remember just when I started being allowed to help cook--mostly stir together things dumped into the mixing bowl to produce breads and cakes. Mother had an electric mixer but used it only to beat egg whites. Using it to beat batter was Cheating (1930s rules). The tool of choice for beating batter was a child. The batters a child would beat a few hundred strokes, counting out loud, were the sweet ones into which the said child could dip a spoon. We had that Betty Crocker Cook Book and used it.

The first thing I was taught to cook "all by myself," to be able to cook while Mother was recovering from the birth of my natural sister, was cornbread:

1. Your father is in charge of the wood stove. It should be as hot as possible. Remember not to touch it as you are probably wearing the kind of clothes people wore around 1970, which were different forms of spun plastic, and melted easily.

2. Pick a baking pan, If using an 8-9" round or square pan dump 2 cups white cornmeal into mixing bowl. If using the 9x13" pan, 3 cups. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in the pan.

3. Stir in 1 teaspoon baking powder per cup of meal, and 1 teaspoon salt. For extra "health food cooking" points, omit the salt. 

4. Tilt the baking pan to coat with butter and drop the rest into the meal mixture. Mix to distribute evenly through the bowl.

5. Pour in 1 cup of milk. Into the milk crack 1 egg. Stir the egg into the milk, then combine evenly with the meal and add water until it feels right. Usually you use a little less liquid than meal, but this depends on the humidity of the air and should be determined by touch.

6. Pour into the hot buttered pan, slam it into the oven, close the door tightly, and bake until the smell of baked bread fills the house. The hotter the oven, the less baking time. Faster baking is better but, realistically, a wood stove tends to maintain a moderate to slow oven. 

Real buttermilk was often in the refrigerator, since we made our own butter by shaking cream in a clean canning jar, and if you have real buttermilk you can substitute plain baking soda for baking powder and buttermilk for milk. This gives a distinctive flavor and texture that some people prefer. If, alternatively, you have "self-rising" cornmeal, with the baking powder and salt mixed in, you can skip step 3. These are the only variations that can properly be called cornbread. Dozens of other things can be made by varying this recipe further; they are not cornbread.

Biscuits are made the same way, but with wheat flour instead of cornmeal. Biscuit dough is more cohesive than cornbread dough and can be cut into rounds and squares before baking. Biscuits can be held in the hand while eating, but slices of cornbread are transferred to bowls, at the table, to which children add milk and adults add tomato juice. This is eaten with a spoon.

Either cornbread or biscuit dough may be made thinner with extra milk or water and cooked on top of the stove as pancakes. These are served on plates. Cornmeal pancakes may be topped with molasses or tomatoes. Wheat flour pancakes may be topped with molasses, maple syrup, or any sweet fruit topping and/or butter. 

Adding either flour or sweetening to cornbread dough was something Northerners were supposed to do, therefore ridiculous. Mother, who grew up in the North, never did anything so Yankee-ish as to adulterate cornbread with flour or sugar. Leaving out the salt was as low as she'd go. Baked desserts were, however, normally made with flour, sometimes eked out with oatmeal; making gluten-free cakes with cornmeal was downright hippie-ish, when I started experimenting in my thirties. And one thoroughly Southern great-aunt liked to experiment with multi-grain breads, adding oatmeal, rye flour, or other ground-up grains to her cornbread. I don't remember anyone else raving over these results or trying to copy them, but they disappeared fast enough and nobody accused the great-aunt of being Yankee-ish. 

As a gluten-free adult I do all kinds of innovative things with cornmeal. Use a can of fish, beans, or vegetables, or a cup of soup, in place of the milk. Add onions, sage, and pepper to cornbread dough. Use cornmeal to make banana bread or similar sweet "quick" breads. Bake cornbread in a deep dish and pour vegetables and/or beans and/or meat over it like an instant tamale pie. Bake a layer of meat sandwiched between two layers of cornbread dough. I would probably have thought these variations were disgusting at the age when I started making cornbread and biscuits.

Poetry

Seasonal: 

https://classicalpoets.org/2024/07/04/it-goes-without-saying-a-july-4th-poem-by-warren-bonham/

This is what we call a testerical male. In this case it's been pounded into his testosterone-poisoned head that the price of sharing a yuppie wife's income is doing his share of household chores, but in his mind he's still thinking that he's doing "women's work," that his floor is supposed to be scrubbed and his laundry done while he's out of the house. It's a sickness some men get. It needs lots of chore therapy.

https://www.ablemuse.com/2k/gallen-losing.htm

Politics (Election 2024)

Yes, it's possible for the Trump haters to be obnoxious enough to generate sympathy for Trump. Though one of Trump's more obnoxious traits is his reliance on his haters. He works haters. I don't think a person should depend on the "I can't be all that bad, because look at the kind of creeps who hate me" dynamic; I think Trump does depend on it. But, crumbs, look at the kind of creeps who hate him.

https://thecivillibertarian.blogspot.com/2024/07/was-it-worth-trouble-mr-trump.html

The only thing Trump's ever had in common with Abraham Lincoln: being hated by snobs.

The only thing he's ever had in common with Andrew Jackson: deliberately baiting those snobs.

But he has, through no merit of his own, had one thing in common with Ronald Reagan: both of them stayed out of war with Russia. Though credit for that needs to be given to the people, here and also in Russia, who either realize that war is never a good idea, or at least recognize that war between the US and Russia would be a spectacularly bad idea. 

Risking a "hot" war with Russia is a D specialty but the party as a whole can't be blamed for it; most Ds aren't that bad. It has to be blamed on a small select group of Ds who are well past draft age, probably never had children, and particularly hate young men. A typical D would probably be willing and able to throw these aged lousy creeps into the solitary prison cells where they belong. Joe Biden is older and less alert than the typical D.

Politics (General)

Exactly. There's little if any actual revival of fascism or feudalism but there is an increasing awareness that nations are better off when the citizens are informed and independent and free to do their own thing. And people who fret about "inclusivity" need to start including that in their plans--plans to grow up and let other people grow up, get medical help if they can't control their control cravings, stop screaming that free markets don't correct themselves and strip away the protectionist regulations that keep the free market from self-correcting. If we really want all people to enjoy equal rights and freedoms, that's the way it's done. 

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2024/07/04/independence-day-musings-sorry-lefties-were-not-fringy-you-are-n4930357

I clicked over to X last week. I can't say I recommend anything I saw when I clicked to see what was making the name "Candace" trend, but ohhh, the dogpile of misogyny and even racism that spewed forth when Candace Owens dared to express some "moderate" thoughts. I think Owens might do well to work with a professional speech writer; she said some things that were easy for haters to pounce on, things that made her sound "too young." I think Owens' haters should be identified as individuals who have lost all claim to any moral high ground. It's one thing to be young, get carried away, and overstate expressions of love, loyalty, even indignation. It's another thing to be infantile  and kick and scream "I hate you!" 

What is the matter with left-wingers who can't say things like "Candace Owens certainly is Black, and American, and female, and young, and also gifted. We wish she were in our party. As things are, we owe respect to her as a human being even if we end up voting for someone else"? 

Why is it so easy for right-wingers to say things like "Joe Biden has always been more a figurehead than a leader, and the strain of it has been visible throughout his presidency. He should retire. His performance in the CNN Debate against Trump was that of an aging champion, but even if his gift for oratory had been as great as Ronald Reagan's, his presidency has been something nobody wants to extend for one more day. We owe respect to him as a human being even if we end up voting against him and the party he rode in on"?

There is a depth to left-wing hatespews that's just not there in right-wing rhetoric. Right-wingers do of course make fun of left-wing politics and the way left-wing ideas fail left-wing politicians. Right-wingers may never get tired of remembering that Biden's earned the lowest approval rating ever recorded of a sitting President of the United States, that Mrs. Obama struggled visibly with her weight and diet, that Bill Clinton got someone's clothes dirty, and so on. Have right-wingers ever even pretended to doubt that Biden and Clinton are still White, or the Obamas Black? Even if Rush Limbaugh did enjoy letting his audience bicker about whether he meant to say "Hillary Rodham Clinton is not loyal" or "Chelsea Clinton is an awkward adolescent," even if there are Republicans who rate themselves repulsive enough to suggest that sex with them would be the worst thing they can wish on Joe Biden, "conservatives" just don't spew out the kind of hatred that seems to roil continually beneath so much recent talk about "inclusivity." 

I'm wondering whether that's because all humans, even extroverts, are just hard-wired to feel better when they're not following religious dogmas that have been clearly shown to be harmful to humankind, the way Socialism has. Whether left-wingers' bitterness is a product of long-denied, unconfessed, unforgiven, festering guilt.

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2024/07/if-youre-maga-and-youre-out-they-say.html

Butterfly of the Week: Eurytides Orabilis

This week's butterfly is Eurytides orabilis, a small Kite Swallowtail found in Central and South America. Because its white, yellow, green or cream-colored wings have wide black borders, with one wide black stripe down the underside and one stripe (in isocharis) or just a tab (in orabilis orabilis) of black down the upper wide of the forewings, it's sometimes called the Thick-Bordered Kite. E. dioxippus might be said to have a better claim on that name, since its borders are typically thicker, but calling orabilis the Colombian Kite doesn't make things much clearer as dioxippus is also found in Colonbia, and is more common. Orabilis seems always to have been rare.

The black border is even wider on the hind wings, covering the scalloped outer corners of the wings above the long black tails. The wingspan averages about two inches. Males and females look alike.

Photo by rtshaw80. This species has not been photographed as often as some Kites. Most web sites use photos of museum specimens, which fade to black and white although living butterflies can be vividly colored. The species was discovered only in 1872,

The name orabilis is a Latin word for "capable of being entreated," listed but not often used as a woman's name (sometimes thought to be the origin of the name Arabel). It is not to be confused with horribilis, "capable of causing horror, horrible." However, it's hard to see the relevance of either word to butterflies.

The basic E. orabilis is found in Costa Rica, Panama, and Guatemala. The subspecies E. orabilis isocharis is found in Colombia and Ecuador. 

Photo by Luis Miguel Constantino. The southern subspecies isocharis, "equal grace," has stripes both above and below on the forewings. 

As in many Swallowtail species, females eclose with a full load of eggs and may have to wait a few days for males to mature enough to mate. Young males hang out in groups near shallow water, drinking water from wet sand. Females flit around the edges of these "leks" from time to time, checking out the males, until males are ready to flit off with them. After mating, males fly high and wide, often above the treetops, while females fly around plants in the genus Guatteria, placing one egg on each chosen leaf. They may be found at any time of year. 

Although this species is listed among the attractions of some popular parks and preserves like the Piedras Blancas in Colombia, records of observations look like "1 sighting in July, 2 sightings in October," and so on. Most of the Kites are host-specific and cannot overpopulate, which makes them sparsely distributed when the population is stable at optimal levels. Good clear photos of orabilis are "rarities" because there can be a maximum of one caterpillar in a tree, and only a few of those caterpillars will become the butterflies who place a maximum of one egg in a tree for the next generation.

Photo by Hholbrook

Though not common, the species seems not to be threatened.

Eggs are said to resemble little white beads.

Caterpillars are described as grayish at first, maturing into green skins with black spots. They have the usual humpbacked look that conceals a yellow osmeterium

Digitalized sources didn't even offer a description of the pupa or the process of pupation. A generation of these butterflies may be three to four months long. Not much is positively known about them. There is room for scientists to add to the world's collection of knowledge.

Wal-Mart Cheated by Own Chatter-Cheat. Hoot.

At some point during the long holiday weekend some of us went to Wal-Mart. Fireworks were popping outside. Store employees were blaring at people to shop fast and get out--the store would be closing in another hour. Obviously they wanted to go out and watch the fireworks rather than watch the cash registers. At any given time only one employee was actually tending a cash register. 

As usual I placed one item at a time on the counter and watched to see that Chatty Cathy scanned each item only once. As often happens, Chatty Cathy found this terribly distracting and intimidating.

These yappy cashiers always claim that they feel a need for reassurance that they are human, and that that's why they chatter like monkeys. Learning to work in silent dignity like a human being might help them feel more secure in their species identity. Their body shapes look human to me, but they need to work on specifically human skills like being able to concentrate on their job instead of fretting about the little status displays that are of such concern to dogs and monkeys.

Though clearly not Highly Sensory-Perceptive, "Cathy" was able to see that I was intentionally withholding eye contact and watching the cash register. A smarter or nicer girl would have taken this as a tactfully silent reminder to her to focus on her job and not try to play the chatter-cheat game--distracting the customer from "mistakes" in her own favor. Cathy compulsively displayed the lack of a healthy sense of shame by persistently chattering, even running around the end of the counter and having to be told to stay in her place. Blessed with enough sadism to enjoy watching how badly extroverts can humiliate themselves before they just shut up and act like human beings, I watched the cash register more closely, expecting to catch Cathy trying to cheat me anyway. 

A fully human mind can accept that, when people sign contracts to work as employees in big chain stores, they are entering an unequal relationship with the stores' customers. Their emotional feelings, and particularly their self-esteem, are of no importance to the customers. We think it's good that they are employed, we prefer letting them add up purchases and make change to letting machines do it, but their social lives are of no interest to us. They need to conduct their social lives on their own time. Finding people who care about their feelings is up to them. As customers we care about finding what we want to buy, paying for it without being cheated, and taking it home.

But something goes wrong in the fetal brains of people like Cathy. Lacking clear senses of who they are and what they're meant to be doing, their consciousness beats about in what seems to be continual fear that other people are going to attack them. Their social status displays are bids for control of situations in which they need, instead, to work through their fear of not having control. They badly need to learn to deal with the fact that other people are not interested in them. They tremble visibly with frustration when customers break up the bad thought pattern many stores allow them to form while working as cashiers, "I can manipulate this person into making conversation with me as if I were the person's equal, while at the same time cheating the person out of money; I don't have to feel afraid of this person because I'm so clever--enough to cheat the person even if I don't need and don't take home the money."  

It is indeed unfortunate for humankind that people with that kind of brains are born. In any case, this thought pattern needs to be broken up. If Chatty Cathy can be helped, it will be by replacing it with a more helpful thought pattern like, "I can live with the fact that this person is completely uninterested in me. I can find my own friends on my own time."

Cathy's hands trembled and her voice rose as she continued to try to force the distracting conversation and I continued not to open one. In her anxiety Cathy forgot to count the items she'd scanned and, in fact, cheated Wal-Mart. I had made it really easy for her by buying canned goods in bulk--half a dozen of each kind--and, finding empty boxes on the shelves, packing twenty-four cans in two boxes. Cathy scanned only twenty-three cans...and the can she failed to scan was the most expensive item that she had undoubtedly planned to scan twice. 

Well, everyone wanted to go out and watch the fireworks, including the wheelchair shopper waiting behind me. I figured I'd take the receipt home and explain Cathy's problem to store management at their web site. 

What a pity Wal-Mart has chosen to add more annoying cookies to walmart.com this summer. The site worked for me in May but this morning it didn't work. 

Oh, well, I could always tag Wal-Mart on Twitter. I typed "x.com" into the browser bar. X has added cookies that kept it from working, too.

Attention Wal-Mart. Attention X.com. I have not changed any settings since the last time I used your sites. Either you have added new cookies that violate previous contractual restrictions, or your sites are generating that message because the sites are too cluttered to get through the storm-damaged local server. You need to strip your sites down, remove invasive cookies and memory-hogging screen clutter, and keep your sites accessible to people from communities that value privacy. Try cleaning up the graphics, making sure nothing moves, blinks, or pops. 

Anyway...When we unexpectedly take home more than we have paid for from a locally owned business, of course, we go back to the store, explain the situation, and pay the manager what we owe. 

When it's a big chain store...many people would say, "Never mind! It's free money!"

This morning I think I'll just post it on the web site and see whether any Wal-Mart managers care about their stores' image enough to thank me for explaining the situation. If they do, I'll send them the receipt and the $1.82.

Rejecting Biden: What's Race Got to Do With It?

Last month (5.28.24 p. A5) the Kingsport Times-News harmfully misrepresented Black women writers and/or Biden supporters by printing a disgraceful piece of misunderstanding on the part of Cynthia Tucker.

Cynthia Tucker, perhaps wilfully, misunderstands White American voters in the same way most fiction writers misunderstand opposite-sex novelists: Grossly overestimating the amount of time people different from themselves spend thinking about, well, them. 

What seemed to set her off was that a Virginia school board voted to restore the names of schools named after Confederate officers. This is not a "race" issue, either, though it could be made into one. Since it would make a long diversion here, let's just say that Tucker obviously didn't spend enough time with the life and letters of General Lee in school, nor has she given much thought to the level of strife among different ethnic groups in North America at this period, and she seems to have yet to read Thomas Sowell's history of how ethnic minority groups have been treated, worldwide. The Civil War was not about race or slavery, though slavery was a test issue. It was about local self-governance, as is the local school board's reclaiming the right to name the schools.

For poor self-obsessed Cynthia Tucker, reclaimng the names of those schools is "growing bolder in racism." It is not. Everything is not about Cynthia Tucker! And my concern is that, because Cynthia Tucker's self-focus reads like whiny narcissism and nobody likes whiny narcissism, giving articles like Cynthia Tucker's a public platform may actually be building a resurgence of racism. 

Let's put it this way. The young people collectively known to cyberspace as The Nephews are a mixed lot; some look White, some really are nothing but White, some look Black. I love them impartially and don't care to try to understand how anyone else might be able not to see their wonderfulness, impartially. But what that means to me is that I expect everyone to appreciate that the Black ones are not whiny narcissists like Cynthia Tucker. If any of The Nephews, Black, White, or other, were saying "resurgence of racism," I'd expect the story to be about a business that refused to serve Black people and what they were doing to take it down.

Why is Trump judged less unfavorably than Biden? Tucker asks, and in her self-obsession she "has seen clearly" that it's all about racism. 

Never mind that both Trump and Biden are White. Both are old men; as such, both grew up thinking and talking about non-White people in a different way than we do now. Biden may have been more genteel about it because of his background--but what that means in practice is that Biden had to think less about non-White people, because of his background. Nobody can be blamed for thinking a gentleman is nicer than a person-who-is-not-and-will-never-be-a-gentleman. That opinion has been echoed around the world for three hundred years. The fact is that, beyond appointing some non-White people to prominent positions (which Trump also did), Biden's policies have done more damage to non-White Americans than Trump's have. Politeness is good but Biden is the one who politely let Black people's parents' little Mom-and-Pop business be shut down. Non-wealthy people, even Black people who are really keeping it real, notice things like that.

This is why the Ds can't win the popular vote merely by replacing Biden with a younger D who endorses the same polices Biden did. They have a strong chance if they can reclaim Candidate Kennedy; if they nominate, e.g., Kamala Harris, they're dead. The party's current policies are just too dysfunctional to win votes. Kennedy's willingness to look at prickly issues that other Ds prefer to ignore  enjoys wide bipartisan support and might claim enough swing votes to beat Trump. Party-liners who aren't strongly opposing censorship, reconsidering the United Nations' failures and its claim to any further support from us, and standing up to Bayer, Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer, can't beat Trump even if tey are not only young but also pretty. Ds need a candidate who will vigorously repudiate Biden's mistakes, not in a spirit of contempt for Biden or scoring off their "enemy," but in a spirit of correcting decisions that failed to serve anyone, anywhere, well enough to be continued.

Reclaiming the names of schools is about a pathetic token attempt to reclaim local control of the said schools. Choosing between the two old White men--the three old White men if we count the one who's most aware of the real issues of concern to Americans, and also most likely to live another four years--is not something sensible people can do as if choosing a real feminist or a real Black American, or anyone who really had the interests of women, Black people, lefthanded people, Catholics, celiacs, or any other special interest group in mind. 

We have a choice among White men who are all about themselves and, if anything, their heirs. I pity anyone who imagines that Trump is motivated to do anything on behalf of anyone whose name is not Trump, but in that he's a few points ahead of the other two. Kennedy may have good intentions toward, but has not been able to unify, people whose name is Kennedy. Biden has been credibly accused of unspeakable crimes toward one other person whose name is Biden, and of criminal conspiracy with another Biden. 

I'm blessed with one candidate who represents me on one issue, which happens to be my top-priority issue. Many people are less fortunate in this year's election. If they're voting their interests as part of a large demographic bloc, they're voting on which candidate has done and is likely to do the least harm to their bloc. 

"Elites"? Who are they, and who cares? I'm afraid that, if you're reading this on a computer, you are "an elite." I make that judgment call based on the number of things I don't have to explain to you that I would have to explain, at great length, to the people who use the Internet just to watch videos and the people who don't use it at all. I don't believe voters are terribly concerned about "the elites" but they are concerned about Biden's willingness to let the United Nations dictate that the United States should be like the backward nations of the Old World and regress toward tyranny. They don't want censorship. They don't want to be told to spend a month celebrating a Deadly Sin. They don't want to be told what to eat, drive, say, watch, read, or think.

"Skepticism over Biden's handling of the economy" is not necessarily too tactful a phrase, given that the larger portion of responsibility for the economy belongs to Jerome Powell. Let's just say that the voters can tell that the economy is not doing well. They're out of work. The locally owned businesses in their neighborhood are shutting down. The prices of things are higher every time they go to the store. These conditions have never helped an incumbent candidate. Or party.

Concerns about the ages and conditions of all three candidates are valid but, of the three, Biden has had the most conspicuous lapses in public. All three men's voices are weak points. Kennedy's is permanently fried. Trump's tenor, almost treble, voice and negative-status-indicator accent sound the strongest of the three, on the whole, but they're far from being assets. But Biden, not necessarily through any fault of his own, looks by far the most likely of the three to collapse, during any given public appearance. It's not that any specific number of birthdays makes a person "too old" for anything the person may want to do. It's that Biden looks as if any day now, any day now, his soul shall be released. This did a lot to temper the criticism of him in even the opposition papers, but it can't be kept from working against him in the election.

Biden's vice-president's no help. Many Americans are still prejudiced, even bigoted--only not in the obvious way Cynthia Tucker imagines. It's not simply about "race" or color. 

Voters have, on the whole, kept our opinions of Kamala Harris to ourselves. That does not mean they are favorable opinions. Still, whether voters merely think Harris wouldn't be a good President or actually hate her or fall somewhere in between, their prejudices--preconceived notions--about Vice-President Harris are very different from their prejudices against (a) Kanye West, (b) Sarah Palin, (c) a blue-eyed blonde English-speaking woman who wants to immigrate to the US without following the standard procedure, (d) a more typical looking Tex-Mex student at a community college, and (e) a Black single mother who is juggling different part-time jobs and still relying on handouts to pay the inflated expenses of living in a city these days. 

Prejudice about money, against those who have either much more or much less than oneself, are much harsher and are taken much more seriously than prejudices about physical looks. Many White Americans are sincere admirers of various Black American celebrities. They are awestruck--and uncritical--about Clarence Thomas; they wish they or their wives looked like Halle Berry; they'd be absolutely delighted if Tiger Woods moved into their block or Karine Jean-Pierre sat down beside them at the beauty parlor. They would not trust any of those people, because their prejudice tells them not to trust rich people, but they would admire and emulate any or all of those people's achievements and would want to cultivate them as acquaintances.

On the other hand, those voters still clutch their purses when they see an ordinary young man across the street, and some of them may clutch tighter if the young man is Black. They still make the assumption that even young children from poor families or neighborhoods are dirtier, rougher, slower to learn and more likely to steal than rich kids are, though in fact most children are dirty, rough, and likely to steal and some rich children are very slow learners. If they hear that someone is or has been unemployed for more than a year, they want to believe that the person is unemployable, even if they know the real reasons why the person is unemployed. 

At no time in history have human beings ever had particularly warm and fuzzy feelings about people perceived as pushing or sneaking into a place far from their home in the hope of making more money there than they could at home. At a few times in history governments have encouraged immigration; even then, the masses have not exactly welcomed immigrants. Prejudice against immigrants may be moderated by factors like the perception that Scandinavian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were going to raise wheat on the prairies (i.e. stay well away from the established resident population, unless individually invited to visit) and offer some security against indigenous populations'  understandable rancor. Prejudice aainst immigrants is heightened by factors like inflation, a high cost of living, crowded cities, and a perception that one's children are likely to be poorer than one's younger self was; thus it doesn't really matter who's crossing our southern border now. Blond, English-speaking immigrants from former Soviet Socialist Republics maybe less conspicuous than Black, French-dialect-speaking immigrants from Haiti, but people who don't welcome immigrants (who are in a clear majority) don't care what immigrants look like, actually; they just want them to stay at home. 

Trump's exploitation of prejudice against immigrants is gratuitous; he could beat Biden without it. It is ugly; it may even be based in Trump's view of his own parents and grandparents. It is offensive to Americans who see themselves as belonging to old families and/or well off and/or liberal and/or well educated and/or members of subcultures that value hospitality. It is other bad things as well as these, but it is not racist. People who identify as Black, Brown, and Red see themselves as threatened by undesirable immigrants, some of whom are White. People who have immigrated legally, or whose parents or grandparents have done, are among the loudest opponents of illegal immigration--and Trump is one of them. 

If Cynthia Tucker had frankly indulged n the normal sort of pearl-clutching "Trump is so tacky" comments the upper middle class make about Trump generally, and specifically mentioned his exploitation of people's justified concerns about immigration, that would have been both reasonable and natural and, at the same time, a novelty in this country's history. It would be an instance of a well-off daughter of an established, upper-middle-class if not positively landed, family deploring the vulgarity of a loud, working-class son of immigrants...except that Tucker happens to be Black and Trump happens to be White. That might even have been interesting.

But no, Little Miss All-About-Me had to claim that Trump's campaign is all about immigration, that his position on immigration equals racism, and that people support Trump because they are racists. If Cynthia Tucker's goal had been to demonstrate that Black women aren't worth educating because what they and anything they write will always be so stupid, she'd be throwing herself up against a solid wall of evidence, but this article would have done as good a job as can be done.

Opposition to immigration is coming from people whose parents immigrated from the same places the current immigrants are leaving. It is being expressed toward people of the same physical type, the same ethnic type, the same language group, as the people against which it is directed. When the demographic types of immigrants are mentioned as a basis for opposition to immigration, the image that arouses the most opposition is of groups of young White men. There probably are people who oppose immigration by one physical type more than they oppose immigration by another physical type, but the majority of anti-immigration feeling is directed toward all immigrants impartially.'

Trump does not particularly need the pointa his campaign scores by engaging with actual issues rather than whining "Anyone who disagrees with us is a racist." For the sake of maintaining a two-party system the Ds need to show some initiative in facing issues of concertn to today's voters, like upholding individuals' rights to privacy, choice, and freedom of speech. 

During the Clinton Administration one of the smartest women in the D Party, Arianna Huffington, blew the whistle on corporate censorship regarding the role of Lilly's moxt profitable product in homicide-suicides. Earlier this week one of the smartest men in the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich, made the claim that the proliferation of bureaucratic agencies under D aministrations was necessary to protect America from tyranny by rich businessmen. Very well; let the Ds rally around the candidate who's been willing to stand up to Bayer, Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer, and let those agencies justify their existence by cracking down on those corporations' bids for censorship and global tyranny.

If the Ds were able to unite around Candidate Kennedy they still have a hope of being able to offer a positive alternative to Trump...instead of doing all the bad things Ds claim to fear that Trump will do, only less competently than Trump would do them.