Today's Links...Did I forget to post a book review? Well...I read a book that was meant to be funny. The book started with one idea that really was funny. It needed two or three more ideas. Instead of taking some other ideas and let them react with one another, the author just kept on writing the first idea over and over. There are three-star reviews of that book on the big review sites, now, if you look for them. I'm sorry, but if a funny book is going to consist of monologues by a parody character, that character needs to be--if not intelligent, at least reacting to as many different things as Dame Edna Everage or Robots Read News.
Forgiveness, Trying to Force, Prematurely
Does not work. Sorry. Here are these German Christians trying to radiate Christ's love at mostly Muslim "refugees"/immigrants. Quelle surprise! They find that many German people have an "attitude of 'Refugees not welcome.'" An incident of rape-terrorism like the Berlin incident is not going to be forgotten. Nor can it be swept under the rug with "everything's fine-fine-fine and we all love-love-love everybody!!!" You have to take off the hideous forced grins (doesn't that feel better?) and face the facts. You have to admit, "What those so-called Muslims did has shamed all Muslim men forever, and unfortunately if you are male and a Muslim you are going to have to spend a lot of time apologizing and dissociating yourself from those scum, demonstrating your loathing of all forms of rape-terrorism and your profound respect for women. And that is probably going to apply to your great-grandsons as much as it does to you. Even if Muslims tracked down every one of those scum and inflicted the most bloody and brutal punishment on them, Islam is disgraced by what they did." When people do things that are loathsome to all decent people, there may eventually be pardon for people who demonstrate that, despite belonging to the same group as the evildoers, they loathe what was done as much as everyone else does...but it won't be achieved by pretending that nobody has a valid reason to feel loathing toward the idea of Muslim men who claim to be "refugees." The US-born Christians reporting on this mission would have done better to use language like "Muslim men have yet to clear themselves of suspicion," instead of blaming those with whom they are, very reasonably, not welcome.
I write this, with tears starting to form, as one who has worked and lived and travelled with Muslims, and found them to be good people and good friends. So what went wrong with the "refugees"? Very likely they'd become "refugees" by being violent criminals in the first place...but the fact remains, they committed a crime in a place where they were known only as "Muslim men." People don't forget things like that; people take a long time to forgive them.
Glyphosate Awareness
USPIRG has launched another round of petitions to governors to ban glyphosate in States. This type of campaign succeeded in several States and many cities and towns, in the 2010s, and was declared "unenforceable" because property owners supposedly have a "right to spray." We need legislation recognizing that there is no such "right"--or at least, if there is, then those harmed by poisoning the air and water have a corresponding "right to the lex talionis with a formal public process licensing, e.g., the deliberate administration of immune system suppressants together with typhoid bacteria to anyone whose glyphosate spraying has caused a celiac reaction, in the amount of one week of typhoid fever per reaction, applied to the property owner until he is dead, then to any laborers he has hired." Eww ick. I think it'd be much easier just to criminalize spraying anything the sprayer is not willing to drink a litre of, outdoors.
Anyway, I found their petition outdated, and I doubt that Governor Youngkin has much more respect for the self-titled World Health Organization than I have, so here's what I wrote:
"
Glyphosate -- the main active ingredient in Bayer's Roundup -- is known to cause many unpleasant reactions in humans and is thought to be a probable human carcinogen. We shouldn't continue to allow it to be sprayed where we live, work, and play.
The health risks of glyphosate have been known for almost a decade. In 2019 a federal jury unanimously agreed that Roundup was a "substantial factor" in causing a man's cancer. Glyphosate causes pseudo-celiac reactions that are similar to, but often more severe than, real celiac reactions to wheat gluten; before glyphosate became so popular, there were no deaths from celiac disease. Now there are increasing numbers of deaths from celiac disease among people who don't even have the gene.
I am a celiac. Because my niece and nephews are also celiacs, I've been studying my reactions in the hope that they might have a chance to grow up healthy. Because I have a sociopathic neighbor who covets my property, I've been deliberately exposed to glyphosate vapors to the point where I've had to declare my out-of-control reactions as a disability. We need laws recognizing that deliberately making people sick is a crime.
Bayer recently announced that the company would begin to remove glyphosate from its lawn and garden products. Since they promised to do this by 2022, we can see what their announcements are worth. But even if the company keeps its word, it can't guarantee that Roundup is safe. New chemicals may, like glyphosate, seem to cause only mild temporary reactions at first, then build up in the environment to the point where they kill people.
The best way to protect our health is to ban outdoor spraying of anything but water. I strongly urge you to ban all forms of glyphosate, and take action to limit all outdoor spraying, in our state.
"
Here's the link you can use to send your own letter using this petition form:
Related? Edwidge Danticat tells of Haitian detainees being fed "food that would stay neither up nor down"--the body purged it out almost intact. How do you get food like that? In 2005, the year they were talking about, it was very likely an early version of "Roundup Ready" crop trials. Today, that's a fair description of many things sold in big-chain stores as food.
Marketing
Small publishers working open-air markets share the experience I've had schlepping my secondhand books out to the Friday Market. Well, it was better than commuting to Duffield or selling out of that warehouse where people were always wigging out, reacting to the black mold. I can't say I've missed it. I want a store.
Poems
By a White man, yet, and about White people. I am getting seriously tired of publishers begging for any drivel any member of a trendy high-pressure minority group may send them, while (a) ignoring the smaller minority groups, on the whole, because how many Inuit or !Kung writers are there? and (b) blatantly discriminating against White men or, in some cases, White people of any kind if they're not writing about being homosexual and/or mentally ill. Enough with the self-hate, White male publishers of the world. I read a couple of effusions from "queer" poets left over from June's bean-counting gesture, this morning, and the plain fact is they were not good poems. The one about Neville Chamberlain is good on several counts; it rimes, it scans, it sheds light on the real world outside the poet's head (or, in the case of the "sexual diversity" poets, crotch), and although it's serious, the poet seems to have enjoyed writing it. There are "diversity" choices for which that can be said, too...and then there's a point at which it's obvious that bean-counting has replaced actual reading and editing.
Zazzle
The Butterfly Garden Checklist T-shirt...Unfortunately, the checklist goes on the back of a T-shirt. A small butterfly picture on the front shoulder, or a short message like "Save the Butterflies" on one shoulder and "Save the Wildflowers" on the other, would go well with the checklist on the back...but unfortunately Zazzle doesn't offer that option with the V-neck T-shirt. Boohoohoodles.
So, it looks better on a yard sign anyway!
Someone else's sign:
And here's a South American butterflies shirt. Yes, it gives me ideas.
So here's the North American edition. It took five whole minutes to design. Please show respect for my investment of time by buying it. You can change the color; you can move the design to the back; you could, if you wanted to spend five or even ten minutes, put another dozen butterflies on the back; you can order it in a woman's or child's size, or put the design on something that's not a shirt.
Zazzle offers can coolers, too. I thought of the Zebra Swallowtail first because it's a cool butterfly, it looks cool, and I liked the idea of putting the caterpillar on the bottom.
Or what about Monarch butterflies, although orange is a hot color, and a milkweed blossom on the bottom?
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