Actually these things are easier for older, cheaper browsers to handle when they're short...but night watchers are day sleepers and I didn't get Sunday's two links posted by midday on Monday. Day sleeping when we can, adjusting our sleep time to fit around things that involve other people, ruins anyone's memory by breaking up that nice efficient rhythm that allows our subconscious minds to keep track of things like scheduling. At any age.
I sat up until about 6 a.m., which was when the Professional Bad Neighbor came into the neighborhood, and when I thought "But it doesn't matter if he is here now because he's not going to risk being seen trespassing by any other neighbors who might come up early in the morning." So I went to sleep after 6 a.m. I hadn't had a full six hours' sleep the night before, and that is how I woke up, bright and late, at 1:30. That's normal, not part of the reaction to the glyphosate-contaminated beans, which is proceeding on schedule, not comfortable but not life-threatening. The reaction is likely to be aggravated by airborne vapors during the day...pray for more rain!
I may be merely scaring him onto other people's property but I think the Bad Neighbor is walking about less this year. It is possible that some widow-spider type from out of town might be interested in him, but rumor has it that he's had a terrible time with Long COVID and arthritis in the legs. Some rumors...are obviously incorrect. If I had the power to give viral arthritis to people who deserve it, the Bad Neighbor would have been wheelchair-bound long ago. Long enough that, most likely, the beekeeper would still be here, as would the supposedly disabled Vietnam veteran. (They were good neighbors who stayed on their own property. They are missed.)
Animals
Another lot of good clear moth photos:
Censorship
Google is, technically, a private company, and has, technically, a right to censor Robert Kennedy's videos. Technically. Bearing in mind that anyone who wants censorship might as well be standing behind a big neon sign that says "I AM 100% WRONG. I KNOW THERE'S NO RATIONAL SUPPORT FOR MY POSITION. I AM ONLY DEFENDING MY POSITION BECAUSE I AM STUBBORN ABOUT BEING STUPID." Because, whatever selfish motives the person has for clinging bitterly to the indefensible position, in the long run it's stupid. It's like Bayer's continuing to sell glyphosate rather than work, as promised, to help farmers make the transition off the whole "pesticide" habit. Doing the right thing will cost them money today but persisting in the wrong thing will cost them everything, and whatever they may have in the way of souls, not too far into the future...In the Southern States, we can remember John C. Calhoun. In Bayer's native country (to which its operations should be confined), they can remember Hitler. Some ideas are so bad that, the longer you cling to them, the more you end up losing.
Look at Twitter these days. How fast did your home page move before censorship? How fast does it move now? How many page views did Twitter bring your way before censorship? How many does it bring you now? Twitter is indeed an X, an ex-network, a virtual ghost town where the overindulged advertisers scream at each other without a prospective customer in sight. A censored web site is a dead web site. Al Gore's global warming theory is a joke, and his vision for the Internet is self-destruction. If we don't keep the Internet free--voluntarily free--from censorship, this might be a good time to invest in manual typewriters.
And the Party of Censorship? Would be best advised to move to China now. At this point I think Candidate Kennedy is the Democratic Party, or whatever it may end up calling itself--the only serious opposition the Republican Party has. The left-wingnuts aren't electable and I doubt they'll be really welcome in their own towns.
Choose Laughter
Why we know no government office is likely to help...or, what we need to pound into the memories of our elected officials as something to stop? I say the latter. Anyone who can convince us that person will, if elected, require the person who takes a call to a government office to stay with that call until it is resolved, even if it means standing up, will win the chief executive position--state or national.
Cybersecurity
Oh my glory, how my page views have surged up this summer! The first week or two after walking away from Twitter, people were still looking for me there, and page views here were down in the single digits as Tweeps didn't realize there was anything here to read. Then page views began slowly climbing back to the usual three figures. Then they suddenly soared up to five figures, mostly in Singapore.
I like Cheong Lee San's (dsnake1's) poems, and Gaudy Boy Publishing, and its Singaporean authors. I would like to think that these nice people are building my numbers. To some extent they probably are.
Unfortunately, the system is not reporting that people are swarming over my reviews of Malay Sketches or Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday. Too many of those page views are coming from people visiting this site but not reading a specific post. That means they're trying to hack into Blogspot. That means that all they can do to me is mess up this web site (and I have copies of the content), 'cos it's all right to be little-bitty, but sooner or later, if unstopped, they'll be able to tap into other Blogspot bloggers' ad revenue and associate sales commissions, trace those to some poor souls' real identities, stalk and harass and even physically attack bloggers..We don't know who they are, but people who want to know where people really live have been known to want to punish people who let it be known that they're "gay." Or "promiscuous"--as it might be affirming that widows might date or marry again, which is taboo in some places. Or unsympathetic to those people's political agenda, which in some cases hides behind the name of a religion. Until you know what a snoop's real agenda is, you can't afford to imagine that anyone is safe..
This web site has always been unsympathetic to lots of different political agendas. It wanted, very much, for a long time, to be about a widow's second marriage, among its other things. It follows and endorses web sites maintained by people who are "gay," and Black, and Jewish, and traditional Catholic, and Republican, and parents of (multiple!) young children, and grown-up hippies, and Wiccans, and Seventh-Day Adventists, and I lose track of what-all else. This web site has to be paranoid. We have no choice. We store no information that would confirm the identity or physical location of any private person who is still alive. Our contact list is not "underground," consisting as it does mostly of writers who want publicity, but it is...discreet.
Cheong Lee San's web site has been plagued for about a year with a nasty full-screen page that pops up, when you click on a link, and says "Click 'Allow' to prove you're not a robot." I don't think he's doing that. It is some sort of cyberpest.
Some of you may be seeing that page now. If you are, do not click "Allow." Many of the sites I link to wouldn't care if you were a robot, and the rest have their own ways of determining that you're human. Close that window. You should get back to the page you wanted. So far it's more of a nuisance than a real threat to security; but do, please, complain to Google. The whole cyberworld wants these pests shut down.
Music
You knew there had to be a parody of "Rich Men North of Richmond" forthcoming.
Dan Mitchell shared a whole batch of songs published by Reason but, for some strange reason, Youtube doesn't want to open links from Mitchell's site. See under "censorship," YT. There is no other social site that can compete with what Twitter used to be. However, Discord and Rumble are clones that could very easily replace Youtube.
Poetry
If you love this painting as much as I do, you might want to read Sunra Rainz' poem about it:
"Public-private partnerships" (like Washington's Metro) can be really impressive while the original, well-intentioned people are running them. Then people inevitably spot the extra opportunities for corruption that are built into them...and...
"
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
― Benito Mussolini
― Benito Mussolini
"
Web Sites That Obviously Need to Lose the Paywalls
Web sites that hide the comments behind paywalls will no longer get links here. Because the comments they attract are too rude!
Senator Mitch McConnell has let the asset that used to be his most valuable--his willingness to work with the opposition--become a liability as the other party has become increasingly out of touch with reality. Specifically, with the reality of its own members' opinions. Those people, I'm not talking about Democrats generally but about the self-styled Democrats making the noise in Congress these days, are so far from being what most of us have in mind when we say "Democrats" that they really might better be called Colonialists. They want to make us a colony of some degenerate European or Asian country, which one to be determined by war, the way things were before our Revolution. So Senator McConnell's ongoing efforts to compromise and communicate with these people have been increasingly harder for people to understand, much less support, and the Senator is being urged to retire.
And Senator McConnell also happens to be an old man. That is a separate issue. "Old" does not mean "senile" or "incompetent." Some people who are as old as he, or older, are still doing their jobs as well as ever. In fact, from what I've seen, McConnell is doing his job...as ever. It's McConnell's own peculiar problem that the job people used to want him to do has been rendered obsolete by left-wing extremists.
So at one news site this web site used to like, there is now a video of Senator McConnell, who comes up for reelection in 2026, being asked whether he intends to run again in 2026. This video makes it obvious that the Senator does have a clear memory of recent events...such as the day when a group of his constituents started chanting "Retire, retire, retire." They want him to retire for political reasons; they want a partisan Republican who'll ram through legislation that'll send the Colonialists to China. You can see Senator McConnell looking to the audience. If he's still alive and fit to serve in 2026, which he's too old to take for granted, does anyone want him representing them in the Senate any more? He's waiting for someone to wave, or shout, from the audience, to tell him whether to say "Yes, I'll serve as long as I'm wanted" or "No, the people have spoken." And nobody's giving him a clue. And a couple of staffers rush up and try to steal the cameras or, when that fails, to hustle the Senator offstage. Nobody wants to see a decent man, who has grown old over years of faithful service, cry on camera.
I'm not even a Republican and I feel for the Senator. How is it possible for Republicans to sneer at him the way they're doing, hiding behind the paywall? Are these people Republicans? Has this web site sold out to hostile alien interests? Are there real Republicans who shoot their own wounded in the feet this way, and why aren't the more competent members of that party doing anything to stop them?
Possibly it's just that they don't want to cry on camera. Everyone cries when they look at the old dog's painful, feeble efforts to drag itself up the steps it bounced up and down so many times, and plan the dog's very last visit to the vet. The obsolescence of Mitch McConnell's peculiar position of service to the nation is at least equally as sad a contrast, and is likely to cost all of us a lot more than the dog's last trip to the vet.
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