October 20 Link Log

Busy, busy, busy, following up on hack writing orders and pre-posting book reviews all day. Categories: Christian, Michigan, Poetry, Politics, Psychology, Shopping, Travel, Writing, Yougov. Zazzle? Buried in the e-mail. At one point today I thought I was catching up with the e-mail, then realized that an entire page (mostly of irrelevant Niume comment notifications, to be deleted, but deleted by ones because an occasional Niume comment is relevant to me) had come in while I was elsewhere in cyberspace. Sigh. I'd rather be too busy than too bored.

Christian 

Jonathan Cain shares his Christian testimony at what I must warn you is a more than usually annoying page even by The Blaze's standards. (This computer opened it, but not easily.)

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/10/20/dont-stop-believin-journey-keyboardist-shares-his-path-to-faith-in-first-christian-album/

Michigan Update 

Looks as if Michigan may be setting itself up for another large-scale disaster. Tuberculosis was an epidemic in Europe and North America, one or two hundred years ago. It's no longer a serious health issue here because it's a bacterial infection that responds well to treatment with antibiotics. So if real refugees have tuberculosis bacilli, TB, that's not a reason to deny them shelter or employment; it's a reason to offer them a cure. By "covering up" the problem, people purporting to help refugees may be literally killing the refugees as well as endangering the host communities. But...Michigan? In the state that contains Battle Creek these idjits are "covering up"..."Idjits" isn't strong enough. Even if lead poisoning is involved they're behaving like full-blown homicidal fools.

https://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2016/10/refugee-tb-cover-up.html

Poetry 

Fellow Virginians...we've let North Carolina draw ahead of us in funding Elizabeth Barrette's Fifty States poem series. This is disgraceful. (I've seen a draft of her Virginia poem. It's at least as good as this one, maybe better, more focussed. Fund it please! It's only $10!)

http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/4145340.html

Politics (Election 2016) 

Charles Krauthammer (not linked) says Trump almost won. Trump says Trump won. Scott Adams says Clinton won, but just barely, and then goes off on an interesting tangent about whether the election is being "rigged." My take: At this point it needs no further "rigging." Getting brain-damaged Clinton past any number of Democrats who are active and healthy and reasonably popular, and repulsive Trump past more than a dozen viable Republicans who even campaigned, was the part that had to be "rigged," and it was. We are now deciding who gets to make the speeches handed to her/him by operatives who will include, most noticeably, Bill Clinton...this time without the benefit of Alan Greenspan. (The position of this web site has long been that Alan Greenspan was the only thing BC's administration had to recommend it, and Greenspan's Objectivist apres-moi-le-deluge fiscal policy wasn't really a good thing either.)

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152067706781/i-score-the-third-debate

I agree with Norb Leahy up to the last two paragraphs...in the next to last paragraph he's using "Communist" with a capital C in the old inaccurate fashion, to mean aggressively socialist, and in the last paragraph his claim that a greedhead like Candidate Trump won't use existing socialist laws, institutions, and morality for all he personally can get out of them...? ???

http://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2016/10/false-morality.html

Candidate Trump is not, repeat not, Hitler. Neither is he Franco, Mussolini, nor even Khomeini. But he does seem to incline toward the same unholy alliance between Big Business, Big Government, and Big Military that Jonah Goldberg and Larry Elder have noted on the Left. I support free markets and business and enterprise--but there's a huge difference (go ahead and read "'uge," imitating Trump's accent, if you want to be mean) between the way I support those things, probably the way you do, and the way Trump does.

http://washingtonspectator.org/donald-trump-and-the-f-word/



Psychology 

How do you remember things? What kind of memory triggers recall things to your mind? Some of my memory triggers are discussed in my comment on this post:

https://wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com/2016/10/19/memories-are-made-of/

Shopping 

If anybody out there knows a "Mr. and Mr." couple, +Beth Ann Chiles has a nice pendant for them...

http://itsjustlife.me/i-had-good-intentions/

Travel 

Barney Scout Mann leads a virtual hike through the Sierra Nevada in California:

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/a-walk-through-the-pacific-crest-trail/?_r=1

Writing 

Even if it's in an e-friend's rating, +Andria Perry is rating high! She deserves it. She delivers a nitty-gritty, down-home Alabama blog with lots of inside tips about the frugal life of a country gentlewoman, with short, fun reads every day.

http://themarthareview.com/top-5-blogs-you-should-be-reading/

Can I pick just five? Scroll down if necessary; you'll see a long stream of blog feeds, some active every day and some inactive for months or years, on the right side of the screen. It's ironic but, due to people's moving on in life in one way or another, the great legendary blogs--Drudge, Malkin, Ozarque, Making Light, Language Log (I don't even have a book link for them! Pitiful!), many more--just aren't where the blog action is these days. Some of the great ones still post good stuff, but not every day, or every month, any more. Self-funding Andria Perry is surging ahead of me in the frugal nitty-gritty blog department, and may well be our next Angela Nissel. Problogger has an active job ad page, which is nice for freelance writers in search of gigs. If our correspondent and U.S. Representative, Morgan Griffith, weren't so busy being a Congressman he'd be a great blogger. Scott Adams rates up there with the legends of the blogosphere, and +Mona Andrei has been rated pretty close to his standard of humorous blogging. There is a lot of good stuff I've been neglecting at Live Journal, in addition to Elizabeth Barrette and M.C. Hogarth. How would I know which blogs you want to follow, anyway? If any reader cares to post a comment about which topic most interests you, I'll pick five blogs that tend to focus on that topic.

Yougov 

Once again...both you and I get free stuff sooner if you use this link to join Yougov. I should mention that, unlike some survey sites, Yougov does not waste your time with surveys that ask a lot of questions before they start counting points...I think we could use a law requiring survey sites to award points upon the opening of the first question, myself. If a company wants to analyze surveys only for a certain demographic group (in the U.S. Spanish-speaking people are the hot ticket of the moment; you'll get more surveys if you tell'em you prefer to take surveys in Spanish whenever the option is offered) then the company should take responsibility for sorting out the surveys of special interest and paying the other people whose time they've taken up. The trouble with Surveymonkey and some other sites is that you could theoretically spend hours telling everybody your age, location, first language, and so on, and never get a single point. Yougov has not been doing this; they usually include questions about, e.g., Clearasil and Olay in the same survey and let the sponsors deal with how many results they get from teen vs. senior respondents. I think we should all encourage Yougov to continue making all surveys pay off for all respondents, regardless of their answers.

https://today.yougov.com/refer/brglBv6yISldXGeAQbYXBg/