Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Link Log for December 30

(Reclaimed from Blogjob. "Long-tailed tags": Bubblews scamforest restoration in IndiaFrugal Gracious Living Challenge,Mary McDougall recipes,organic gardeningyear end news summaries for 2015.)

I've spent a good part of this day sending links to this post:

...to people who've been asking me for money. The result has been a long Link Log. Categories: Celebrity Gossip, Education, Food (Yum), Good News, Green, News Summaries, Phenology Links, Scam (Bubblews)...
Celebrity Gossip 
This is a nasty story, but I think my own personal Nephews are old enough to know that touching any private part of anybody can be very, very dangerous...
I've been asked, "Would you still be interested in watching a new movie with Bill Cosby, even if he pleads guilty to charges of sexual assault?" I'd be less interested in watching a new movie with Bill Cosby than I was in watching his old ones, because he's older and--no way around it--less entertaining than he was for way longer than most movie stars keep their "star quality." I don't think most movie stars are good moral examples for anybody; I don't think Cosby's dangerous, now, if he ever was. But...was I still interested in the U.S. Senate, even during the years when both Senators from Massachusetts were sexual sleaze whose hands I would not have shaken? "Too bad for the Coz his last name's not Clinton," Doug Giles commented, in a post that's not linked here because the site's hard on laptops, but desktop computer users should be able to read it.
What my husband was saying in 2004 was, "You see why our students feel so bitter and burnt-out. Any time a Black person has any success, some people want to tear him down. And unfortunately some of those people are Black." Sometimes I see truth in this claim. Consider the harshness of the attacks on Cosby relative to the soft-pedalling of comparable attacks on Teddy Kennedy. Consider the way people who chortled over George H.W. Bush's saying that he and Ronald Reagan had "sex--er--setbacks" in the homophobic 1980's, and ignored Donald Trump's saying that his running as a third-party spoiler was "Not--out of the question" a few weeks ago, are dogpiling on Steve Harvey for his obviously innocent misstep. Consider the people who rush to claim that Dr. Carson's introvert personality is costing him polling points while ignoring the fact that he's consistently polled higher than the equally low-key, possibly introverted, Jeb Bush. Nobody in these United States says, and few people consciously think, "Only a White man should be considered for this job"--but many people unconsciously set the standards higher for anyone who's not a White man. And those of us who see that tendency making life harder for some of our young relatives than it is for others, as I do...yes, we do mind.
Education 
Nelson Mandela was an example of lifelong learning. While we've discussed the irrefutable charge that he learned too much, too uncritically, from Marxism...he learned from a lot of other people, too, including a great Christian thinker, Albert Luthuli.
Food (Yum) 
A healthy dessert:
McDougall recipes are here! (One topic on which I'll focus, when the Frugal Gracious Living Challenge is funded, is how quick and easy preparing these meals can be...much more fun than fighting the traffic to get into a noisy fast food joint. And much more affordable. You'll be seeing times and prices.)
For most of us, a McDougall (or Sinatra) meal is just good food. For some people, it's part of an actual medical treatment that may reverse certain disease conditions. If you are or know a nurse or other health care provider who needs continuing education credits, this link will help you get proper credit for learning more about the role of food in medicine.
Good News 
This was posted on one of the "in-house" pages at Blogjob. The blogger from India apparently didn't feel up to making a full-length original blog post out of this news story. (The "more" you can read, if the link lets you in, will be other people's comments.) He just shared the summary, as people often do when we log into Blogjob and see the prompt "What's new?", to brighten everyone's day:
"Jadov Molai Payeng from Assam created a forest of more than 1200 Acres of land in 35 years gap. He is a poor and daily labor in the farms, this village is next to Brahmaputra river. Due to its floods regularly that place was become desert type atmosphere due the heat he found the several creatures are vanishing. Then he wish to start planting trees to reduce the floods effect and he started planting and and created a real forest in his tenure and get award from Govt of India and several international organisations
Read more at https://blogjob.com/activity/#wCuxMhVB8vPfb6hd.99"
Green 
One should probably not make too much of this, because there are some practical difficulties about switching to more sustainable (and profitable) "organic" gardening/farming techniques. Land that's been poisoned will have a pest population explosion before the predator population expands back to balance, and some buyers will be concerned about how long the soil has been poison-free before they accept produce as organic. However...habit and superstition do seem to be hard-wired into humans.
News (Summary) 
Linked because I agree that Everett Piper's speech on political correctness was a "great story." A great speech. A speech worth including, along with the Gettysburg Address and "I have a dream" and "Ain't I a woman," in the list of speeches teenagers memorize and present in competitions for scholarships and cash prizes. I seriously thought of copying part of it longhand from the Kingsport Times-News and retyping it here; if youall e-mail that you haven't seen it in your own newspapers, I'll do that. If I didn't believe that the kids who kick and scream because a discussion of love makes them feel painfully guilty are capable of reading it the wrong way, my favorite line would be "It's not about you, it's about others." But we need the context to make it clear.
Here's Thomas Sowell's year-end summary:
Here's John Stossel's:
Phenology Links 
Steve Milloy shared this link, with the comment, "If it weren't for 'could' and 'might,' there would be no 'interesting climate findings.'" I'll elucidate further for a less specialized audience: The solid facts in these findings, sorted out from the conjectures, document local climate phenomena. Local warming, an indisputable fact, is rampant in the Northern Hemisphere, is making summer miserable in our cities and killing babies and seniors in "temperate zones" (like Chicago, Washington, Paris). There are things we can do to reduce local warming. How much it's contributing to global warming, or how much that matters, is still very much a matter of "could" and "might."
Scams 
Too many Bubblers have learned that this blogger from Croatia is right:
P.S.: Right...before shutting down the computer last night I promised to add a graphic. This is an Amazon Affiliate site, so the first few writers' names were linked to Amazon pages for their books. Since his name wasn't linked yesterday, what about a graphic link for John Stossel's first book?

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