Link Log for September 30

Categories: Animals, Celebrity Gossip, Christians and Others, Food (Yum), Food (Yuck), Politics, Psychology, Writing.

Animals 

There's no mention that the dog in question actually bit anybody, and the deputy needed to waste five bullets on it? Sounds as if the deputy needs a lot of retraining...about animal control, self-control, weapon control, and, er um, are they sure s/he even went to the right house? At the deputy's own personal expense, please.

https://www.change.org/p/fresno-county-internal-affairs-fresno-county-sheriff-s-office-training-unit-hold-fresno-county-deputy-accountable-for-shooting-family-pet-and-implement-training?recruiter=12133782&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink

Unbearably cute kitten picture...my camera wouldn't have taken a picture this good of our Imp, last summer, but this is the sort of thing she did. Constantly. All kittens are cute but Imp worked at it.

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/130230727689/seekingwillow-this-is-even-cuter-when-you

Less cute kitten picture. Fur be it from this web site to echo the Humane Pet Genocide Society's mindless chanting about how horrible it is to allow kittens and puppies to be born, but this web site does agree with Wendy Welch about the general idea of responsibility. Personally I'm willing to live with an indefinite number of Heather's and Ivy's descendants, and a reasonable confidence that other nice people will want to live with these purr-ticularly lovable cats. If you're less confident about either your cats' kittens or your willingness to live with them, autumn can be a good time to schedule spaying: many cats don't have kittens in autumn, and most autumn kittens don't survive in any case.

https://wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/dorian-grey-kitten-of-erudition-speaks/

This, of course, is not how calico cats have kittens...

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/130223952514/smilingribs-how-calicos-give-birth-based-on-a

Celebrity Gossip 

Celebrity blogger Michelle Malkin sees inspiring First Lady material in Candy Carson:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423730/ben-carson-wife-cand

Christians, and Others 

Liz Curtis Higgs on encouraging words:

http://www.lizcurtishiggs.com/say-something-nice/

Food (Yum) 

Vegan recipes that will tempt the carnivores...

https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2015nl/sep/recipes.htm

Food (Yuck) 

Once again, Monsanto and other corporations successfully lobby to prevent states labelling known GMO food products...like the corn and rice that nature guaranteed would be safe and healthy for me to eat, until Monsanto deliberately bioengineered some corn and some rice to be more like wheat and therefore poisonous to me. Mind you, no state is trying to prevent GMO foods from being sold, or for that matter advertised. What the states are trying to do is label GMOs so that people who have suddenly developed immediate, unpleasant reactions to some formerly natural, healthy food can avoid the bioengineered products their bodies reject as poison--e.g. "Roundup Ready" corn or rice, for those of us who inherited the gluten intolerance gene. Click here to tell your U.S. Senator that GMOs need to be labelled:

http://bit.ly/1iJ5ZXw @food_democracy Pls RT #labelGMOs

Although it's hosted by NYTimes.com, this graphic and list rolled up smoothly and displayed beautifully, ad-free, even in this computer's vintage version of Internet Explorer, so I expect it will work for you too. It's not good news, though, for "conservative" readers. The Congressmen we have to thank for taking the right side of this bill are pretty left-wing. John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, other people Republicans don't get many chances to commend.

To be fair, most Republicans in Congress, including Congressmen Griffith and Hurt, took the wrong side...because they listened to too many farmers, many of whom had been coached by Monsanto salesmen, wailing that these farmers ca-a-a-an't make a living growing corn and rice without the GMO versions, and/or that their "natural" corn and rice are probably contaminated with the GMO versions (which is likely, and frightening if you're gluten-intolerant). No matter how many Washington insiders, like Al Gore, have fond memories of getting to ride the tractor during summer visits to Grandpa's farm, most Congressmen are not farmers and do not understand the solution to a real, and growing, problem.

In order to have a sane policy on GMO labelling we will have to go back and do things that it would have been much cheaper and easier to have done twenty or thirty years ago. Farmers will need to be re-educated about the (Bible's!) model of crop rotation, rather than monocropping and depending on poisons and GMOs to maintain crop production. For the first few years, the corn may be wormy. GMOs will need to be registered and reared in complete isolation, probably in greenhouses. Nobody will make a profit.

Why should American farmers get Green, get small, or get out? Because the alternative of relying on poisons and GMOs is unsustainable. Virtually all corn grown in North America today is now poisonous to many people, of whom I'm one. The next GMO experiment may be more poisonous to more people. "Zombie apocalypse" fiction may be a morbid fantasy, the actual disease and death may be ordinary, but our "sophisticated, enlightened" population wouldn't be the first population group on this continent to be wiped out by a plague...a preventable plague.

http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/114/house/1/462

Politics 

The phrase is "Politics makes strange bedfellows." (For foreign readers, this phrase dates back to the bad old days when travellers slept in bunks, berths, or communal benches, and has the same literal meaning as "fellow travellers." Anyway, who would've expected the Pope to meet--and hug!--lapsed Catholic Kim Davis?

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2015/09/30/pope-francis-and-kim-davis-secretly-met-during-dc-visit-n2059205?

Psychology 

In a review of Julie Klam's book, Please Excuse My Daughter, I observed that Klam presented herself and her family as the kind of people I'd long perceived as Homo denaturatus, a pathological variant of H. sapiens produced by insufficient interaction with other species. Today Jonah Goldberg shared an essay by David French, who describes "victim culture" as a sociological phenomenon created by interactions among H. denaturatus, where instead of punishing offenses to oneself as smears on one's "honor" or pretending that being offended is beneath one's "dignity" people compete to impress authority figures with the intensity of their wounded feelings. We are definitely talking about the same mostly affluent, mostly Northern U.S., mostly left-wing guys; French doesn't mention the females of the sub-species.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424805/victim-culture-kills-american-manhood

Writing 

For how many video game aficionados is this rule true?

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/130230739444/things-that-dont-break-white-male-gamers