Links below the rant...
Censorship
No link for the bad news because you've already read it. It's the Bill Cosby story all over again...Russell Brand is sometimes funny, sometimes bold in telling the truth, sometimes (I think) misled. I'm inclined to believe that he was all that his haters claim he was, twenty or even ten years ago; he has that look and manner. (Cosby did not, even at the time of his alleged misdeeds. I'm not talking about the hair; I'm talking about the body language.) Brand looks like a man who's trying very very hard to overcome the fact that he was, not too long ago, a scag.
And Brand, unfortunately, is young enough that he could still be dangerous. This web site called for moderation when people were howling for punishment for Cosby, on the grounds that Cosby was obviously unlikely to do anything more dangerous than down, or for Senator Conyers, on the grounds that he was in a bleepin' hospital when the story broke. The world does not need a lot of protection from eighty-year-old cardiac patients. Those exemptions do not apply to Brand.
So...my generation grew up in a world where any male/female conversation could still ruin the life of the female involved. Payback time has come. At least the men whose careers can now be ended by an unsupported allegation of inappropriate touching, or inappropriate language, or the inappropriate suggestion that a mere male would be qualified to tell if a woman was incompetent, are not subject to abortions.
Doing anything that could cause pregnancy, when you're not married and ready to be a father: It's not something we talk about any more.
But one observation this web site made during the demolition of Bill Cosby's career, and will make now. The timing of the accusations against these men are very suspicious. Would anyone have denounced Cosby if he hadn't dared to oppose the "Black Americans are incapable of having stable marriages, doing good work, saving, investing, or owning property, and just need federal handouts and more federal handouts" narrative of the racist left wing? Doubtful. Would anyone have denounced Brand if he hadn't dared to oppose the "All young people are socialists" lie? Also doubtful.
And if Brand still looks like a scag now, he must have looked even more like one when he actively was one, so what kind of women were these dates toward whom he behaved badly? Probably nobody we've ever heard of, but employers may want to be sure they don't inadvertently offer these she-scags any responsible jobs, either.
Flowers
Another beautiful flower that tends to be underappreciated merely because it's native and easy to grow...as long as our native pollinators are here...
Food
Should city governments operate groery stores in neighborhoods that become "food deserts"?
Chicago jokes aside, it's a serious question, because there really are city neighborhoods that can't keep a supermarket. In these cities the supermarket prices tend to be higher than they should be, anyway, due to city taxes and "urban overhead" (shoplifting with the connivance of, and done by, store employees) and just whatever-the-bleep-they-can-get-away-with. However, in the poorest neighborhoods the supermarkets aren't even there. And it's not that they're unnecessary because people buy their groceries from local corner stores, either. There are local food sources but they're fast-food chain restaurants competing with local snack wagons. There's no place to buy basic groceries. There is that catering to the section of the market demographic that burn through their monthly food stamp handouts in the first week of the month, buying all "convenience" food. What about Suzie Smartshopper? She plans and buys groceries when and where they're marked down at the supermarket, just as she would in the more affluent neighborhoods--except that, since no smart shopper owns a car or drives in the city, she doesn't even know people who have a car pool going, so she get to the stores in the nicer neighborhood by city bus. For a start she can rule out anything frozen--it'd melt on the bus ride, likely to be more than an hour of local warming. Also, by the time she gets home on shopping day, she and her family are too tired and hungry to make cooking feasible, so she'd better have bought a supply of overpriced convenience food for that day anyway.
Are there solutions to this problem? I'm not sure. It's an undeniable fact that these neighborhoods are the sinks for people who choose stupidity on multiple levels. People don't own houses, they rent rooms, and if they've overcome stupidity or caught a lucky break they think about moving out of these neighborhoods, not making them better. There's no continuity, no community. "We don't live here. we only stay till we can afford to move away." Lots of people changing their addresses may give a short-term boost to the local economy by making realtors rich, but it's a recipe for neighborhood decline. The best thing for these neighborhoods might be to leave them in their slummy condition while the people drain out of them or die. Then yuppies can move in and claim that applying fresh paint, putting in a skylight and calling the effect of not replacing the rain-rotted floor a "cathedral ceiling," and quadrupling the rent have "transformed" the slum into a terribly chic and trendy urban neighborhood. If they keep the population density down, they may even make the neighborhood charming again...working back to one house per family with at least one acre of garden space per family member and at least one large tree with room to drop limbs on the ground, not the roofs, in between every two houses.
But if people want an alternative that preserves the low-rent city neighborhoods, I'd propose this. Government does not try to operate the grocery stores. Government licenses neighborhood residents to operate them, for profit, with minimal government involvement consisting mostly of making sure they are selling groceries instead of illegal drugs.
Writing
If you blog, have you posted something in each of the 52 categories this blogger has taken the time to classify?
This web site has not been, and will not be, the site of audio or video posts, because our mission statement includes that we'll stay accessible to readers who can't listen to those. At the time of posting I have a laptop that has audiovisual capabilities. So of course my first task was to disable those, because they are memory hogs that don't help me write or you read. However, if readers or sponsors wanted us to post live video content, say of local musicians and music venues, or Jim Spears' idea of a "Flea Market Live" video showing shoppers who'd brought what to a given market on a given morning, we could do that kind of thing. I do have YouTube and Discord accounts, and could probably get Rumble, if adequately compensated for the time. You want to be able to show potential visitors what's still going on at the Carter Fold--yes, country music lovers of the world, it's still here even if the Carter grandson goes by his father's name--you pay for tickets for me and a driver. But, despite my belief that programs like Office should do the same thing in the same way for as long as the original purchaser is likely to live, I do like playing with new gadgets to do new things. Vlogs can happen; they can be linked here.
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