January 15 Link Log

Categories: Obligatory Fundraising Links, Animals, Books, Fun Stuff, Politics, Rocket Science, Writing.

Obligatory Fundraising Links 

The sooner my fundraising goals are met, the sooner these links will stop heading everything I post. If you can't share money, share the links. Liberally. (Y'know, although I'm 99% sure that President Kennedy and those who voted for him would've considered this a "liberal" sort of project, and so would FDR, and Eleanor Roosevelt might well have wanted to do it--she was a well-known frugal fanatic--the sad reality is that, relative to our current political spectrum, the Frugal Gracious Living Challenge can be described as inherently "conservative." But no worries...the content of Frugal Gracious Living posts, when they start happening, will be factual not political. The project will demonstrate recipes, menus, DIY projects, researching, shopping, cheap education, free entertainment. If anyone out there would like to see the overtly political content, with specific party or candidate names, disappear from the Blogjob, funding the Frugal Gracious Living Challenge would be an astute move.)

http://blogjob.com/priscillaking/2015/12/29/so-then-i-told-the-senator/

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-frugal-gracious-living-challenge--2/x/997637#/

Animals 

Beth Ann Chiles went to Australia and, like most visitors to that country, photographed interesting animals doing cute things.

http://www.itsjustlife.me/a-trip-back-to-australia/

Books 

I've not seen The Jefferson Lies yet, but now I'm interested. And here I would've said...I already own a copy of "The Jefferson Bible," a remarkably small selection from the Gospels I might add, and I've already heard every possible argument about his deceased wife's sister; I would've said that the only book I'd want to buy about Thomas Jefferson, for myself, would be a reprint of something he wrote that's not been reprinted or stocked by public libraries in recent years. (That leaves plenty of ground open.)

http://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2016/01/revisionist-history-takes-hit.html

Fun Stuff 

Is Dan Lewis catching Link Log fever? You might want to check out his links...one of them's endorsed for wacky weirdness by Peewee Herman!

http://nowiknow.com/the-weekender-january-15-2016/

Politics 

Apparently there was a Republican debate at some time last night? (They're telling me. Although I've never belonged to a political party, the computer on which I'm typing this is a Republican computer. It lives with Republicans near the computer center. So when I took the laptop home for the night, these Republicans had saved a seat for me to watch the debate with them and hired a driver, which they can hardly afford, to take me home around 10 p.m. CNN showed us people waiting to watch a Republican debate, then showed us about ten minutes of Anderson Cooper making wisecracks about Donald Trump's trash talking--in contrast with an old clip of Ronald Reagan's classically understated reaction to a similar situation--and then switched to a long, tedious sequence of random guys eating shrimp and talking with their mouths full. This went on until the driver showed up. Meanwhile, although my bronchitis is getting better and I don't believe it's ever been contagious, I was inevitably coughing...in the presence of an older person who's been in the hospital and been advised to observe quarantine. Oh, the guilt. This person had consented to take the risk of catching pneumonia...for nothing. For random fat guys talking with their mouths full. Bad on CNN; bad on Trump. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest all of their armpits.)

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/137347195831/master-persuader-scorecard-for-the-gop-debate

While I was typing that paragraph about how I missed the debate, SA or an assistant replied that the debate had aired on the Fox Business Channel. I don't know whether my hosts even get that one. I know they checked Fox News. Anyway, another link came in that was so outrageous that, while waiting on another site, I decided to check the discussion on Dilbert.com. It's building up to be predictably lively, all over the place, and fun.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg's thoughts are also interesting (though those who've been carrying on about the circumstances of President Obama's birth won't like them), and contain a useful corrective to my "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" self-description meme...When I say "socially liberal," I mean that our notion of race is 5% history and 95% hogwash, not that we need race-based quotas for new instant-slum housing projects into which everybody should be herded. And I mean that I don't give a flip what the neighbors get up to privately, on their own time and in their own homes, not that we need more mandatory celebration of same-sex "weddings." And I mean that Marco Rubio had a good point about evaluating and penalizing "illegal immigrants" on a case-by-case basis, as in small affordable fines and a chance at legal immigration for the ones who've been good workers and neighbors all these years, deportation for the ones trying to cash in on welfare benefits, and (at best) hard labor until the drug runners' relatives cry and beg us to accept bail money to let them go home and stay home, not that we need to let everybody swarm into this increasingly crowded country. There's "liberal," and then there's "Loony Left," on social issues too.

http://link.nationalreview.com/view/55c8a77718ff4357208b47083ixlc.3fab/69985572

Meanwhile...here's a thing that's always baffled people about me: I'm in favor of more individual freedom, and yet I've actually voted for my first grown-up employer and one of my heroes, Ralph Nader. "Isn't he famous for wanting more regulations?" Yes...but (although he's often pursued them in the wrong way) he's famous for wanting the right kind of regulations. That's the kind that can, by and large, be enacted and enforced by private people who agree with them. I don't think the police should write tickets to people who don't wear seat belts; I do think cars should contain seat belts, and people should wear them.

http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=a62f6d3a19ffbd4c6852a4c85&id=0c390a4fb7&e=1ad40b3989

Rocket Science 

Right. For a ditzy aunt who can't even guide a lot of retired Republicans to the right place to watch a Republican Debate on TV, Freelancer.com is recommending a project that is rocket science. Robotics, anyway. At 2 a.m. they e-mailed this. (Well, they are in Australia.) This contest is not for me. It is for some of the crowd at Dilbert.com, though, who are engineers in real life.

https://www.freelancer.com/contest/NASA-System-Architecture-Registration-Contest-329981.html?

Writing 

Writers fit no stereotype. Matt de la Pena writes about the secret talents that may lurk within big, tough teenagers. I remember a big, tough, troublemaking middle school boy who used to feed me plots for novels we were going to write when we grew up, and a big, tough, very dark-complexioned former Washington Redskin who's also a skilled, sensitive massage therapist, and a big, tough, loud bulldozer man who tamed and rescued the feral kitten Graybelle...no, brawn does not automatically inhibit the development of brain. Even if kids act as if it did.

http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=6605