Late. Sorry. I left cyberspace Friday evening and returned on Saturday evening, and stayed up very late, enjoying the moonlight and watching for criminal trespass. Apparently this frustrated the Professional Bad Neighbor because, mid-morning, he sent a hired laborer to deliver a death threat, "tonight" was specifically mentioned. The laborer also mentioned that the Bad Neighbor had lost another one of his few surviving relatives, recently. I would guess that that would have been the great-aunt in Tennessee who died in a nursing home, well past age ninety, but this psychopath has managed to lose his younger siblings, wife, and infant child already.
The Bad Neighbor's shooting used to bear comparison with my father's, but from his efforts to hunt and poach since last year's spray poisoning campaign, I'm no longer sure his shooting scores are better than mine. I'm not sure, either, how much stronger or faster than I am a person can be after spending weeks sick in bed with puny little coronavirus. And a known psychopath making a death threat publicly is definitely losing some of his mental ability...if he actually intended to carry out the threat, rather than deny ever having made it and try to undermine the credibility of the person he used to deliver the message. I don't expect a shootout tonight, but one should never completely ignore a death threat, so I am publicizing the fact that it was made.
Animals
If you check the last few posts at ko-fi.com/priscillak, you'll see another reminder to sponsor the updated version of the Hemileuca moth post. Just ten short years ago, a single blog post titled "Buck Moth or Stingingworm" could be the most complete, comprehensive collection about these animals in cyberspace, and it was. Now, of course, it's out of date. The Hemileuca moths have interesting DNA so a lot of DNA studies have been done, and although I wrote about thirty-some species and more than fifty species have been listed, science is swinging back to good old Holland's position (taken in The Moth Book about a hundred years ago) that there are only about half a dozen true species of these fantastically variable moths. It's now possible for there to be a complete post, with nearly all live photos, for each species--even the ones that are being demoted to subspecies or variations. Those who like moths should send $5 per post to the mail drop shown below...I don't usually barter for posts at this web site, but if the first person to sponsor this series wants to send me Tuskes' book in exchange for the whole series, I'll take it.
Money
Christian content...The solution to the many flaws of capitalism is not socialism. It is not pretending that some other political system is better or more natural than capitalism. It is subordinating capitalism to ethics. Make sire that the effect of regulations is to make it easy for people with little or no capital to sell any goods or service they can honestly sell, and instead of hand-wringing about the fact that some people have more than others, focus on making it easy for anyone to earn a living. Nobody is harmed when Sam Walton has a few ideas about how his employers' business could be made more profitable, uses those ideas, and makes millions of dollars. Everyone is harmed when John Doe is prevented from selling anything he has that people will buy, any time he needs twenty or fifth dollars. The important thing is not to stop Sam Walton from becoming rich through honest trade, but to make ir easier for John Doe to meet his needs by honest trade than by sitting around whining "needy-needy-needy," If we let people enjoy whatever rewards their work has earned in their own way, and focussed our outrage on incidents where people who want to work are advised to go on welfare, we can make a basically capitalist economy work for everyone, and not even be tempted to replicate any of the failures of systems that always do fail.
The focus on comparisons that is used to market socialism is a formula for failure. When people are focussed on what other people are doing, they're motivated to do no more and, if possible, less than they perceive the other people doing. There is no immediate individual reward for any individual to apply any additional effort, so "the shared reward" is never as much as the rewards the same group of people would earn by working independently for their own gain. Usually "the shared reward" is that everyone loses money. Taking away the profit motive produces immediate loss.
The helpful corrective to the profit motive is higher motives. How can one really enjoy wealth except by sharing it? Faring sumptuously every day becomes downright unhealthy. People stay healthier longer when they live modestly and devote themselves to things beyond "retirement," creative rather than commercial work, family, prayer.
Picture
Tweeted by @danieltoalphoto:
Poetry
I just discovered a poet called Destiny Hemphill. She has dared to express the thought that welfare is not the highest good available to Black Americans. She will catch hate for this. Support courage and honesty at
Psychology
Only some left-wing social circles are the sort of horrible cliques Naomi Wolf describes, and horrible cliques are usually pre-political...but she has a point. Trying to fit into a clique of unpleasant people is not fun; it prevents those who do it from having fun and may thus predispose them to behave more unpleasantly toward others.
Which is why, although I automatically clicked on the Twitter button after reading this, I'll be doing that less often in the next few weeks. Who wants to have their work promoted among a horrible clique? We all need for Twitter to see its overall activity dropping, for those high-paying corporate sponsors to see that nobody's interested in opening yet another drainpipe to spew even more of their garbage into our lives, until Twitter gets back to its roots. We need to take all the life out of Twitter until Twitter publicizes an oath that, if free individual users will only come back, Twitter will
1. Make sure all Twits see all tweets from people we follow in the main column of the screen.
2. Make sure no Twit sees any tweet from people we don't follow, except as a reply, retweet, or comment on a hashtag, in the main column of the page. Keep the ads in a corner and make sure they're smaller and don't distract attention from the main content.
3. Make sure no tweets are "filtered" or interfered with unless they've been reviewed by a human and found to be criminal.
4. Offer new features, like ways to post longer tweets, to those who pay for them, but never suggest that non-paying accounts are "low in quality." Formally apologize to every Twit who's been called that, perhaps by featuring those individuals' high quality tweets in a corner headed "Tweets You Might Have Missed from People Twitter Has Learned to Respect."
5. Make it easy to scroll through ALL tweets and notifications on an account (as it used to be).
6. Time-stamp all tweets with an hour and day, and lose the tiresome "minutes ago" feature that merely destabilizes the page.
7. Pay all returning Twits $1000 per tweet that was "filtered," shadwobanned, or otherwise suppressed from the home pages of the Twit's followers. More if there's any attempt to respond with anything but "Yes, Sir, Ma'am, right away, Ma'am, Sir, and we're very grateful for such generous terms, Sir, Ma'am!"
8. Reserve the "notifications" page for communication between individuals. If it's an ordinary tweet, no matter how good the news may be, or how funny the joke, or how interesting to a Twit's followers, it should show up in its proper place on the home page with other ordinary tweets. Notifications should either address, reply to, or comment on the account holder's tweets.
9. Bring back the version of Twitter that let people toggle between seeing pictures right in the Twitter stream, and seeing links in the Twitter stream to click if we wanted to see a picture.
10. Restore auto-posting of tweets to the blogs that had that feature in the past and to any other web site any Twit may use for a personal blog.
Finally, the big enchilada--addressing the reason why all those detrimental changes were made: Require all sponsors to affirm that they're paying for the privilege of interacting on equal, respectful terms with people who are not, at least while using Twitter, sitting still to be bombarded with commercial messages. Require them to affirm, specifically, that they understand the special value of being able to advertise in a medium they are not allowed to censor or manipulate in the way they did with television. Require Europeans, specifically,. to write five thousand original words on the topic of "Why Censorship Is Evil and What I Am Here to Learn from a Superior Society That Bans Censorship Before It's Too Late to Save My Poor Perishing Country." then peruse a few hashtag pages and identify at least five tweets as "well put though I disagree with them," before they can post a tweet.
Twitter has had the benefit of friendly advice from most regular readers of this page, and has ignored it. It's time for the company to start feeling some pain in the pocketbook. Give corporate sponsors what they squawked for, and watch EVERYONE's numbers collapse. Metrics from a "filtered" web site should not even exist where they can be used as misleading indicators of the popularity of our work.
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