The only way to catch up on those butterfly stories is going to be posting more than one butterfly story in a week...I need a break between butterflies. Today we are going to have a Link Log. It's time I caught up with other people's blogs and e-mail, too.
Animals
No, of course it's not "ridiculous" to grieve for departed animals. Nor is it even necessary to claim that they're "therapy" animals. Our animal friends are part of our lives, just as our human friends are. In C.S. Lewis's taxonomy of love, we may love (some of our dearest) human friends with Philia while we can love animals (and, well, extroverts) only with Storge; either way, their absence from our lives leaves big painful emotional wounds.
Caring about animals does not reduce our ability to care about fellow humans. In fact, caring about our fellow humans requires us to care about the animals they love. Consider the geriatric patients who are being forced to put the last close friends they'll ever have into animal shelters--or choosing to be homeless, instead.
I consider this dear little face. It's a good-mood trigger for me. Queen Cat Serena started out as an undersized, slightly premature kitten, the sole survivor in a litter of four preemies. Her mother and I feared for her survival for the first month or so. No worries! Serena had all the milk and all the attention nature had intended her mother to divide among four babies. By the age of three months she was already, as this snapshot suggests, quite self-assured, not to say full of herself, or bossy...Well, she is, a bit. She also likes fast, rough games and will slap or otherwise annoy people if there's any hope it will get them to chase her. She's not posed for another picture since this kitten picture--she thinks phones and cameras are toys! She also has an understanding of words, and an ability to carry out and communicate to other animals what I've told her, that's beyond rational comprehension; she grew up in my office room and tends to know what I'm thinking. Cats are often decorative objects or amiable nuisances; animals whose humans describe them as friends and working partners are usually either dogs or horses, but then there's Serena. Manx loyalty, Siamese cleverness, American common sense: the best of all three breeds. Lewis said that in real life the different kinds of love mingle. What I feel for Serena borders on Philia.
Would I live in the cave, which is deep enough for a human and several other things to lie down in but not big enough for a human to stand up in, rather than put Serena in a shelter? Would a bear do what bears do in the woods?
The boss around here...
Maybe, instead of whining about whether people prefer humans or animals, we need to recognize that nature always intended for humans to live among other animals and bond with other animals. Maybe we need to admit that "planning" to pack humans into all-human (or human-and-rat-and-roach) slums is a pathological aberration that ought to get the "planners" pensioned off with referrals to psychiatrists. Maybe we need to understand that geriatric patients may have to give up climbing stairs or driving cars, but they need to be in the houses where they remember where things are, with their animals and their gardens, as long as there is any evidence of consciousness.
Climate Change
This one is especially for e-friends who've got into "climate blogging"...and who refuse to face the facts: "Global climate change" may be real, human-influenced, and undesirable, but it is unproven and won't be provable until it's happened. Local climate change--like the weather station having consistently logged temperatures 2-3 degrees warmer than the Cat Sanctuary and 5-10 degrees cooler than downtown Kingsport in the 1970s, now consistently 5-6 degrees warmer than the Cat Sanctuary and 15 or more degrees cooler than downtown Kingsport--is unmistakable and undeniable. But local climate change, a.k.a the greenhouse effect, has served its political purposes and no longer interests those who are really interested in global tyranny. So we see people wailing and anguishing about supposed global climate change, always embracing some theoretical model with a predictable shelf-life of two years, while completely ignoring local cliamte change and anything they or their neighbors can do about it.
Very important: We all need to work together to build environmental awareness. We all need to be aware, too, that, moves that consolidate power and wealth--whether into the hands of "private" corporations or of governments--are not True Green. People who don't live on and work with land in some way, if only as hunting grounds, have an extremely poor record of doing anything to conserve the quality of that land. Big governments, as in China, will happily strip-mine their great natural tourist attractions for short-term profit, telling the people choking on coal dust in the former tourist town that "one does not avoid eating for fear of choking." So, whatever the ecological problem may be, bigger government is not a serviceable solution--once people set up the bigger government structure, they mysteriously lose any government "leaders" who want to conserve natural resources. There's a reason why Moses, having the opportunity to claim a divine right to own all the land for himself and heirs, was guided to divide it among families as family farms and restrict the right of private property owners to sell their land. Permanent responsibility for land promotes, well, responsibility, to the extent that people understand their responsibility. Whereas a government monopoly, even if it starts out with a True Green leader to attract popular support, will have an oil refinery on Lake Tahoe and be stripping Mount Mitchell in another twenty years.
Too many Greens want too much to believe that if we just elect the right people a big totalitarian government will work. Big mistake. Human lives are short. Power doesn't always corrupt every single person beyond repair; there are people like George Washington who don't want excessive power and people like the late Elizabeth II who can surrender excessive power with grace, but (1) the minimally corrupted are rare and (2) upon the passing of the minimally corrupted, there will be a power gap, which will attract the maximally corruptible. Sustainable plans have to focus on equal distribution of power--not technically populism, but libertarianism--tolerating minimal interference with the choices of anyone but oneself.
Health & Wellness
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Politics (USA)
Publius Huldah:
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