The Summer-of-Savage-Inequality weather has finally broken. Westerners reported some rain and cooling temperatures this week, and on Friday Kingsport hit Code Red with an official temperature (in the shade, near the river) of 96 degrees Fahrenheit. That means 88 degrees at the Cat Sanctuary (I checked) and well over 100 downtown. I thought I was going to have to turn off the laptop--it did slow down in that melodramatic way laptops do before they start to smell scorched--but just slowing down activity gave it a chance to recover, and work proceeded.
Then I went offline. Then Saturday's storms rolled in. The neighborhood was very dark on Saturday night and, despite complaints of decreasing health, the Professional Bad Neighbor sneaked in carrying one of those oldfashioned big round buckets of poison spray. Left tracks. Did relatively little harm, because heavy rain washed the poison right down to Tennessee. His family really need to set someone to watch him at night; that stunt was well below his standard, and suggests dementia. Electricity was restored around 2:30 on Sunday.
Birds
The Roads End Naturalists drive out to the Atlantic coast and see, among other things, little Green Herons in their nest.
And others, including storks.
Butterflies
The East Sussex Wanderer has quite a collection. Note that some British butterflies are found only on that side of the Atlantic, some on both sides...and one of his is a look-alike, but not quite the same as one of ours. The Admirals are interesting butterflies. This web site should get to them in another year or two.
Censorship
CHD sent out a batch of news stories. Some of these links are direct translations of others; some are fresh, as they were written from breaking news.
Christian
It's a fair question. The article linked below tells how a couple bought a house with the intention of making it a spiritual retreat for other Christians, then turned the house over to other people for use as a retreat and found another house in which to bring up children. The couple were greatly impressed by the statement that the apostolic church "had all things in common." A commenter then asks why we don't hear more of what he imagines as a very conspicuous movement to communal living!
My take: The Bible does not define "having all things in common" as meaning that all of the early Christians lived in one commune. In fact, it tells us that they did not do that. Their own homes, if they owned homes, were not liquidated to add to the communal poor fund. Rather, those who had room to spare took in either temporary or permanent guests, and those who had none stayed in their own homes and gave thanks that they didn't have to add to others' burden. Rental property, jewelry, the boxes of coins people actually hoarded in those days, were sold. Things people used every day were kept and used in the service of the faith, shared, not sold.
Communalism works when it occurs voluntarily, spontaneously, among people who are dedicated to a common goal. People like that don't engage in "social loafing." Each of them wants to reach the goal, so all give "according to their ability." When Paul joined the Christians, he had tentmaking experience so he worked with, and may have lived with, the tentmakers in the group. Later, as people came to trust and welcome him in other churches, Paul felt that he "robbed other churches, taking wages from them" to help newer or more burdened churches. My guess would be that in every town he visited his first questions included "Who are the tentmakers? Do they need extra hands?" If they didn't, he might have volunteered unskilled labor on fishing, harvesting, or building crews. His model was not "Paul's contribution = Aquila's (or whoever's) contribution," but "Paul's contribution + Aquila's contribution = more for the cause." The reason why communism doesn't work as an economic model for nations is that even people who feel that God has called and empowered them to give that much to a cause, this year, will not necessarily be either so called or so empowered next year. That it works for small groups of people dedicated to a cause is enough of a miracle.
Computer Tip
Computers really do run cooler in hot weather if you can discipline yourself to work with only one or two windows/tabs at a time. I can't, I often have more than 100 tabs open while writing one butterfly story, but I have confirmed that laptops would work better for me if I could work in one window wth one tab open at a time..
Poems
Adam Sedia takes a bash at censorship:
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