Animals
Cute cats make it official...
http://www.mochasmysteriesmeows.com/2016/11/wont-you-be-my-neighbor.html
...today's Petfinder links are American Short Hair cats:
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| Laser Lemon from Atlanta: https://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/36410529 |
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| Trouble from Arlington: https://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/36372983 |
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| Kitty from New York (one of those kittens who get a name before their gender is obvious, he's male): https://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/29454695 |
Barkley:
http://thebookofbarkley.blogspot.com/2016/11/wordless-wednesday-telework-dog.html
Some less fortunate dogs, whose plight is going viral...this is the sixth time I've received this link. I'll share it again, in order to post (here) one of my tangential replies to a comment (there). In the Bible translation with which I grew up, King David of Israel said of a reported pet killer, "the man that hath done this thing ||shall surely die: And he shall restore the lamb fourfold." Some translations prefer "The man that hath done this thing surely deserves to die. He shall pay four times the value of the lamb." What would have happened to the man, if he'd been real? Think about it, Gentle Readers. The vileness of it...the rich man who has a right to slaughter any of his flocks of sheep, the poor man whose one lamb is both his only hope of securing his future and probably his only true friend...I have no problem with the literal KJV translation. While some of the king's army were preparing the rich man's execution, others would be collecting the four lambs from his farm. Pet killing is both a property crime and a violent crime, and should be punished as both. And if the softer translation can be considered more accurate, I'd be interested in learning how or why.
http://reason.com/archives/2016/11/15/the-detroit-police-department-is-running
More fortunate dogs (funny post!):
https://niume.com/pages/post/?postID=164302
Horse story:
http://mausersandmuffins.blogspot.com/2016/11/his-name-is-midnight.html
Cute...mustelid. Weasel or ferret? I'm not sure. There are different species, but size and location are the only clues I've memorized for species identification, and this picture doesn't give the size or location.
Books
From a book, soon to be published, about a tough modern woman:
http://mausersandmuffins.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-warmth-of-being-prepared.html
About the same book:
http://thebookofbarkley.blogspot.com/2016/11/to-be-published-thanksgiving-week-2016.html
A blog that I follow promoted this book on a page I can't recommend because of the annoying pop-up ads. Suzanne Venker was saying that she met women who were reading this book, but were ashamed to admit they were reading it. This web site has to say...we encourage reading everything except for some total garbage (e.g. advertisements that rely on annoying you as the only way the advertiser thinks it's possible to get you to buy something). If you don't agree with a book or writer, you should read it. Know your opposition. I have in my files a detailed outline for a full-length book that, if "women's studies" had remained as hot a topic as it was fifteen years ago, I could easily have written by way of refuting someone else's (deservingly unpopular, not linked) book. You too might find inspiration from a book with which you don't agree...after you've read it and broken down its errors, by ones, rather than just stereotyping it along the lines of "If it's from the other political party, it must be racist."
Now, the book I bought from Amazon:
Communication
Trigger warnings: discussion of sex offense charges.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153259019196/the-hypnosis-lawyer
Crafts
Arty crocheting:
https://asexualartists.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/interview-clara/
This was actually posted in the context of shopping, but I think it's a must-read for crafters, especially if you scroll down to my comment.
http://itsjustlife.me/giving-best-isnt-answer/
Family
Here's a father who shares my concerns, as an aunt, about blogging about one of the subjects dearest to our hearts.
http://daddytypes.com/2016/11/16/the_overshared_generation.php
Fashion
Elizabeth Barrette just relayed the official word that it's now cool to display my safety pins openly. I've been wearing them for years, but tried to conceal them. (Is pinning up the bottoms of "fat pants," rather than re-hemming them, the ultimate form of "slacktivism"?) Check this out; you too may want to consider making safety pins a Statement.
I mean, who would've thought twice...I have never thought twice about travelling with people different from me. Actually, I have taken formal training in order to get paid for travelling with people different from me (in terms of age and abilities) and later parlayed that into working as a legitimate escort, the kind who gets paid for meeting tourists at airports and pushing wheelchairs and so on. It's a great job for a writer, because writers want to meet people who are different from us. Some people's idea of "security" is a big scary-looking man and others' is a nice teacherly-looking woman. But who would've thought that anybody needs to advertise, not just "I'll walk with you through a rough neighborhood" or "I'll boost your hand-powered wheelchair over a curb" or "Yes--if you pay enough--I'll (shudder) even drive," which are paid jobs, but "You can sit beside me on the bus"? We are living, surely living in the days it speaks about...
http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/4168273.html
Green
Comment also posted at the page linked: "Personally, I want solar panels. I want them built and installed by former coal miners or by coal miners' sons and daughters. But that's because my consumption of electricity is low enough, and my home sits on land that includes the perfect space for a row of solar panels, not attached to the roof but up in the orchard, to make solar panels work for me--not because I live in a desert environment where any idjit can cash in on solar panels. It's an individual judgment call. Federalizing solar panels would be the boondoggle."
https://pjmedia.com/blog/the-environmentalists-versus-trump/?singlepage=true
Health
Susan David's "emotional agility" sounds like yet another name for "Fix Facts First, Feelings Follow."
http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=6962
Marketing
Why does this post rate a link? Not because its cat-related content is new to me, or because I expect it to be new to you, but because it's a good example of how to advertise the same kind of product that, when I opened that book blog post discussed above, appeared in a stalk-the-reader-and-sabotage-the-product pop-up ad. Marketers, please memorize: If you want readers to dislike and not buy a product, let an ad pop up halfway through the article they're reading, distracting and annoying them, making the sponsor's brand resemble an annoying housefly. If you want readers to respect and possibly consider buying a product, find a congenial blogger and pay her/him to write an advertorial for the product. It's possible, although not certain, that I'll need another box of kitty litter next spring. Here's why, if I do, it'll be the brand advertised here:
http://www.mochasmysteriesmeows.com/2016/11/5-tips-for-keeping-kitty-stress-free.html
Pictures
There are too many pictures on the Internet these days. Too many people want everything online to look like television. I haaate television, and I love love love the way this computer's "old" browser runs Twitter Mobile picture-free--I have to click on a picture to see it. I think this may be the trend of the future. Two distinct Internets. One can be "wordless" all week long and the other one, the only one I want to bother using, can be text-only with the option of viewing one small still photo at a time. We can call the new one "The Graphics Ghetto" and offer special programs, with remedial printed books and so on, for those aspiring to rise up to the Level of Human Communication, Via Words. Anyway, here are some e-friends' pictures that are worth looking at, beginning with +LB Johnson 's comical cow sculpture:
http://thebookofbarkley.blogspot.com/2016/11/neighborhood-humor.html
+Martha DeMeo photographed rural neighborhoods, old barns...my kind of real estate!
http://themarthareview.com/wordless-wednesday-barns/
Renee Zal has video to illustrate what Reason.com explained better, with words, numbers, and graphs:
http://noisyroom.net/blog/2016/11/17/no-hate-crimes-have-not-intensified-since-trumps-election/
Politics
While reading the safety pin post to which EB linked, above, I found this one. It's a tear-jerker if you have any sympathy for Mrs. Clinton at all. I think this is the "oldest" she's ever looked in her life...and she has been such a beater of the odds. Most people who might pick up the New York Times had no idea that she was "legally blind" without glasses. Kids used to have to conceal that if they wanted to go to most colleges or universities, even the church or public kind. I was in on the student conspiracy to get one "legally blind" buddy through the easy courses at our "focus on personal growth" / "encourage young church members to marry one another" church college. It was fun because it wasn't easy. Hillary Rodham Clinton did that while earning top grades at Yale. I only wish she'd ever had the Clue One about where voters like me are coming from, what we need, what we want, or why...unfortunately, the records show that she never had. I still consider her a feminist heroine, and always will. She rates right beside FDR, many of whose supporters didn't realize that he was a wheelchair-using polio survivor. Awesome game, HRC.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/us/politics/hillary-clinton-in-emotional-speech-implores-supporters-to-keep-believing-in-america.html
Now here's a clever, ingenious argument for an old (and bad) idea. What we need to get rid of are federal departments and policies that override the differences among our States, and restore the sovereignty of the States our founders intended. Ooohhh, shudder, quake, what if some sovereign States tolerate something we don't like? The idea was to let each State run its own experiments on how policies work in practice, thus keeping bad policies that sound good from being enforced on everybody, and allowing good policies that sound bad to get a fair trial. More differences among state laws = more opportunities for people to demonstrate that policies really work, or don't work, by voting with their feet. (Fun fact: Despite a debate that took place before my time, in my lifetime all the people I've heard expressing doubt or disagreement about this have been people with emotional attachments to verifiably bad ideas about public policy. And some have also been racists.)
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/11/16/wapo-op-ed-calls-on-america-to-get-rid-of-states/
Thanks to Scott Adams for sharing this detailed study in support of my intuitive sense, formed over time, of the President-elect's being more of an equal-opportunity jerk than a racist. (Or a sexist--you have to put his "grab women by the..." in the context of his "grab [men] by the..." attitude. It's a metaphor that men from his kind of background use. Btw, remember how many left-wingers liked Henry Miller? Around age fifty I finally read his allegedly pornographic and/or classic books...I didn't like them, because, among other things, he used that kind of metaphors constantly.) Guys who talk this way are giving you fair warning that they're not kind, gentle, or chivalrous...but that doesn't mean they hate one person more than another person, or that they hate anyone at all, particularly. They are strictly out for Number One. If you bear that in mind and watch your back you might get some benefit from working with them.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
How alarmed or despondent should you be by this election? (Personally, I don't feel more despondent than I did when the real candidates dropped out of the presidential race.) This article documents the possibility that alarm, despondency, hate, and anger are being deliberately fed by sore losers on the Left. Some people don't know where the political game playing needs to leave off.
http://www.batr.org/autonomy/111516.html
Those old peaceniks at the Cato Institute have put together a pro-peace foreign policy statement. This web site has no foreign policy, but it's pro-peace enough to feel that people should at least read the Cato paper, whether or not you end up in agreement with it.
https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/our-foreign-policy-choices-rethinking-americas-global-role
Should "faith-based charities" reject the federal handouts that have corrupted some of their ministries during the past fifteen years? I, personally, think they should.
http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/16/should-faith-based-charities-be-eligible
I'm also disappointed that the Concerned Women of America don't include a petition that the President-elect completely repeal Obamacare. That, for me, is Priority One. No use of federal power to force individuals to buy into any privately owned industry, especially those people have chosen to reject for moral or ethical reasons.
http://concernedwomen.org/first-100-days-petition/
Here's a warm'n'fuzzy post about politics and life in general. Definitely read this one if reading other links here has raised your blood pressure.
https://wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/meanwhile-back-in-the-bookstore/
Technology
I don't agree with Scott Adams on the issue of free will, but that's why I read all and recommend most of his posts on this topic. How do you resist the programming and avoid working for the machines? You unplug; you stay connected to more trustworthy sources of information--your elders, the children in your life, your animal friends, the land to which you belong, the sacred texts of your religion. Works for me. Notice how many of SA's generalizations about what "people" or "women" or "the baby-boom generation" are doing are not true about me? You, too, can be different-in-a-good-way. You'll enjoy it.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153301052341/working-for-the-machines
From an e-mail:
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Following the election, Virginia Congresswoman Barbara Comstock and Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, John Whitbeck, visited a notoriously terror linked Mosque, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, or ADAMS Center as it is more commonly known, in northern Virginia, to pander for political support.
The ADAMS Center was founded by senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and its Executive Director Imam Mohamed Magid, is the outgoing President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), designated by the FBI as the “nucleus” for the Muslim Brotherhood’s movement in America.
ADAMS also states on their website that 1/8 of their collection (Zakat) goes towards Jihad.
It should make every patriots blood boil that Rep. Comstock and Chairman Whitbeck continue to validate a mosque with such alarmingly dangerous connections by not only visiting it, but actually doing outreach there.
"It does not actually make my blood boil that Rep. Comstock and Chairman Whitbeck hope to befriend and convert people in anything identified as a mosque, or church or temple. It makes me question their judgment, their chances of success, even their personal safety after visiting a "faith community" that overtly directs funding to terrorists. ADAMS are not just any Muslims. How much of this mosque's zakat goes toward rescuing the girls Boko Haram kidnapped, and ruined socially, in Nigeria? I suspect Comstock's and Whitbeck's motives are humanitarian. Their decision, unfortunately...Both of them are Real Twits. If you want to "twit" them, or tweet to them, about this or other public acts they may be doing in your name (depending on your Virginia voter registration), their staff are easy to reach at @RepComstock and @JohnWhitbeck.
Weird
Or should this go under "Baltimore"? My experience has been that Baltimore is a deeply weird city...
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/11/16/man-enters-pizza-store-through-roof-vent-strips-naked-then-robs-it/
Writing
Should you avoid The Blaze? I obviously don't...but I have been known to warn readers about it. Two reasons: (1) The format of the site is often obnoxious (and so, if you put up with the format and scroll down to read them, are the comments, but a site called The Blaze has an obligation to be sort of incendiary); (2) The headlines are often meant to be "cute" or "funny" or "viral," which means misleading--something perfectly ordinary gets tagged as "crazy, incredible"; disappointing someone gets described as "throwing him/her under the bus"--that kind of annoying, scream-for-attention sort of writing. In my judgment these features don't keep some Blaze writers from posting legitimate, worthwhile content, in spite of the site's less than stellar editing. I'd stop following The Blaze if its headline news feed regularly consisted of false news, the way Globe, Star, and National Enquirer "news" often does. That, I've not seen. So I consider The Blaze legitimate.
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/11/16/theblaze-on-a-list-of-websites-professor-says-students-should-avoid/
Zazzle
A good antidote for the physical effects of alarm and despondency is to laugh. With this in mind, today's Zazzle links offer calendars that should provoke smiles through the coming year:
And if you're sending these calendars by mail, scroll down or click back to see this web site's very own, inspirational postage stamps...
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