I actually started a couple of Link Logs this week and failed to post them, due to spending more time in the real world than online. Here are all the links, freshly compiled this afternoon, while online shoppers can still catch the sale prices at Zazzle.
Books
Not an official history of Kingsport...but Vince Staten is part of the history of Kingsport.
He is also too much of a gentleman to burden browsers (like Grandma Bonnie Peters's) with Amazon links. I've spared youall from live audio and video clips on this web site but I've used Amazon links by the hundred, so I figure you readers can stand another one:
I receive no commission on sales of this book. If you're local, you know you want it. If you're not local, you probably want it anyway.
Cartoon
The Car-Free Life
Addison DelMastro's observation is discouraging, if true. We used to hear a lot of blather about how "urban renewal" programs were renovating buildings and setting up shiny new public buildings. If you don't renovate the people living in a building, you can waste a lot of paint and new bricks and still have stairwells that smell like toilets, because that is how they are used. (Even if an apartment building or row of houses is populated by nice, clean, sober people, it takes only one sinkful of dirty dishes, one child who isn't able to enforce social distancing, to fill the whole block with germs and vermin.) Ten years later, the slums still looked like slums...but they had wider roads. The only real beneficiary of "urban renewal" was the car culture.
Cats
I don't recommend sharing this video with your cat. It might give the cat ideas...This video goes out to those who didn't believe our Mackerel and Polly rode a large coy-dog half a mile in the snow. (Y'think I would've believed that, myself, if I hadn't seen the tracks?) Mac would later be a very large cat but he wasn't there yet, and I don't think Polly ever weighed more than five or six pounds--and if the half-grown kittens were in danger, Mac and Polly would probably have thrown themselves at a bear.
Climate Fraud
Steve Milloy's rebuttal, based on pure logic, misses a key point too...but yes, they're trying it. People with vested interests in distracting attention from the real cause of "more reports of aggravated allergy symptoms" this year are trying to blame those "allergies" on "climate change"!
Once again, if global climate change is happening, it's too soon to know. Local climate change is verifiably happening. Urban neighborhoods always were hotter than rural neighborhoods but the difference in temperatures is rising, and the hot spots are growing. But that's not the reason why going outside among the dust, mold, and pollen is not only making you sneeze, but making your eyes itch, your tear ducts clog, your vision blur, your ability to drive with any sense of safety almost disappear, your heart beat unevenly, your digestion become irregular (or more irregular, or positively diseased), your mood swing, your energy disappear, your metabolic rate drop, your kidney function fluctuate, your learning disabilities (if any) seem disabling, your attention span shorten, and your arthritis flare (or exist--people who didn't have arthritis before are noticing it now). Check for exposure to the chemical stew that is New Roundup. Track correlations between all this misery and browned-out or greyed-out vegetation in your neighborhood.
But...climate change? Ha. Ha. Ha. For the record, the Point of Virginia has enjoyed an abnormally slow, cool, mild spring. I cut my hair on the first hot, humid day of spring, which is normally in May, and this year I was pushing hair back off my face until the twelfth of June. And we have had that reaction that does not feel like anybody's familiar "allergies," but like measles and mononucleosis and food poisoning together, in precise correlation with exposure to a new chemical "herbicide" exposure.
Anybody tries to tell you this has anything to do with "climate change," first hit him with three minutes' worth of basic amateur logic, linked below. Then tell him what really has changed, this year. Then, if he says it's raining, everybody should have a good long laugh before they look outside to see...
Control Freaks
Control freaks really shouldn't have access to money. While we do well to beware of making foreign enemies by involving ourselves in foreign wars, this writer points to places to look for real, overt enemies of the freedom that makes America great--most of them at least partly based in the United States.
Music
Southern Gospel:
Chinese:
Politics (Election 2024)
If Candidate Kennedy believes certain government agencies are corrupt and need drastic reforms, and that certain people in those agencies would try to murder him to keep their jobs, is he "crazy" to be talking about it in public and running for President? Not necessarily.
I have a Professional Bad Neighbor who has threatened to destroy my home, threatened to kill me, and taken dozens of small steps in both directions. And admitted it. The house and my body show the damage this sociopath has done. And, although this seems to be changing fast, for a long time he was stronger, faster, and a surer shot than I was; this has not been one of those situations where a firearm is "the great equalizer." What to do? For several years I didn't know who was doing the damage, nor did I know how far the person was likely to go; I just collected evidence. When I received a death threat, however, I reported it. Not only to the police, but to the public--including you readers. So now if anything were to happen to me or my home, or my cats, or any friend or co-worker of mine, this sociopath would be the prime suspect. So, he's still an evildoer, he's still deliberately paying people to spray poison to do evil...but he'd better pray that all goes well for everyone around me! So far as I can tell he's focussing his harassment on a different, possibly unsuspecting neighbor, and leaving the people I see every day alone, apart from poisoning us with New Roundup. And he's less active, because he may be able to believe that what he has is "age" or "Long COVID," but he's done himself a lot of damage too. He's back to more stupid stuff, like driving by a row of rural route mailboxes, putting mail in the wrong boxes, and shoving in a few ants' eggs. (Yes, ants' eggs, in little tin mailboxes where the ants hatch in the morning sun and are killed by the afternoon sun.. I am not making this up. A lot of this creep's harassment has involved cruelty to animals.) But less climbing onto roofs to pry out nails, or digging up water lines to saw across PVC pipes, can be expected from this lousy creep these days. Am I satisfied? Of course not. The man's a sociopath. Sociopaths need to be locked up. And we as a nation need less babble about firearms that assumes that every firearm is a threat to someone's life, and more recognition that a sprayer of volatile chemicals really is a threat to someone's life. But I am physically safer since I've publicized the threats and harassment.
So I get it. I'm still not convinced that Kennedy is fit to survive four years in the White House, but I'm not convinced that the candidates who are old enough to be our fathers are, either. In any case publicizing his concerns about murder is a sort of life insurance, as is choosing a vice-presidential candidate who'd never get a vote in her own right. Is he crazy? Like a fox. Is he old enough to make his own decisions about how much stress he can survive, just like the other two? Absolutely.
Next question. Can Kennedy win? His own web site admits that he'd be the first Independent President since George Washington's time. The possibility that either or both of the major parties' men could be in an Intensive Care Unit or in prison by November, however...makes this an interesting election for those who bet money on elections. Kennedy has a chance. If he'd been able to work with Trump, there would go the popular vote--no more suspense! As things are, it may come down to how much people loathe whomever Trump picks as a running mate.
Next question: Is it important that alternative candidates are on the ballot and that people vote for them, even if no alternative candidate has yet been elected President? I'd say yes. Neither D nor R party honchos want to change any of the things that matter to you or me: chemical pollution in foods and medications, e.g., or staying out of other people's wars, or reversing inflation enough to make it worthwhile to save money for anything further ahead than Christmas. They want to keep yapping on, back and forth, endlessly, about abortion and gun bans and whichever theory of "global climate change" somebody is peddling each year. (Would you vote for a candidate who had a workable plan for imposing a substantial fine on anybody who brought up the subjects of abortion, gun bans, or "global climate change," ever again?) If Kennedy gets even ten percent of the votes, that's a message to Trump that he'd better use his influence on his chemical company to get away from glyphosate or any other chemical that's sprayed outdoors. I, naturally, think that is very important.
Other people in the Children's Health Defense network may be more concerned about other forms of pollution and contamination. If Kennedy gets ten percent of the votes, that's also a message to our government's various "health" agencies that they need to hold vaccine manufacturers accountable. Testing new experimental vaccines can be a brave and public-spirited act but it needs to be frankly identified as such, with no pressure on anybody to participate in what need to be identified as trials of new vaccines.
So you might think that a vote for Kennedy is a wasted vote in an election that's likely to be about whether Trump or Biden is still on his feet in November. That's a point of view. As we've seen during the last several elections, our presidential elections aren't even decided by the popular vote; they're decided by an electoral college that could just as easily decide to force all three candidates into retirement and elect Jerome Powell (currently chairman of the Federal Reserve bank). But we've also seen that neither Trump nor Biden is a good listener. In order to hear a message from their constituents, they need to have it delivered in a form they can see and feel, like a substantial chunk of the popular vote. If you think banning toxic chemical sprays and holding pharmaceutical companies accountable are important issues, I'd say that, yes, it is very important that you be able to vote for Kennedy.
Being able to vote for a candidate is a different thing from voting for that candidate. Some of you may find it possible to want to see either Trump or Biden in the White House next year. You're related to one of them, or one of them is paying you...this web site can understand. Even so, you need to be able to send them a message by having other candidates, specifically Kennedy, on the ballot.
Kennedy is already on the ballot in most States. In some the ballots have yet to be printed, and in Virginia the Kennedy campaign is still collecting signatures on petition forms to get onto the ballot. You want to sign one of those forms. I did. This site was recommended to me. I find it very glitchy; it didn't work with my main e-mail (the one you see at the bottom of the page) at all, and my back-up e-mail service thought it looked like a "spoofed" site, but we shall see. Give them an e-mail address, maybe a temporary Yahoo one, and screen name--your real identity as a US voter should never be typed on a computer anyway.
Scams
You know "cancer research" is a scam when they say they're working on cancer of the fronthole. Apparently when males have surgical operations that they imagine make them female, then instead of merely spreading the virus that causes cancer of the cervix, as normal men do, they become vulnerable to cancer in the area that has been reshaped into something analogous to a cervix after being removed from the "hole" that would be foremost when a normal man is standing over a urinal. Let's just say that I would only ever donate money to efforts to prevent cancer of the cervix. If you can afford to have a fronthole built, you can afford your own treatment for whatever may go wrong with it.
I had another reason for linking this, though. Seems somebody is confusing me with this Canadian blogger because I recently got an e-mail addressed to "Kate." I asked myself, "Do I even know a cyberspace entity called Kate, popular though that name is in the real world?" and the answer was, "Actually, yes, and she's witty, too." People who like my blog are likely to enjoy Kate's, too, although she doesn't write like an aunt.
Social Justice
It's not actually a new issue at this web site. In cyberspace, where broad-spectrum open forums consistently show a majority of computer-literate people having more conservative views than the site owners who censor other web sites, conservatives may be a 75% "minority"--like Chinese people relative to the rest of the world?--but conservatives are an oppressed, resented, harassed, belittled, insulted "outsider" group. In real life, although members of relatively large minority groups like Black Americans and homosexuals, or well-funded groups like left-wingers and transgender people, do in fact encounter hostility and prejudice--which all right-thinking people oppose--more serious difficulties present themselves to members of "out" groups that are too small to get as much attention as those large, vocal groups do.
Women's claim to "victim group" status is even more problematic. We still are victims. Some drugs, most of them unfortunately legal and often prescribed to women, really do make women who use them capable of killing strangers as insanely as men have historically done. Apart from that, violent crime is still primarily something done by males, with certain specific types of violence directed toward females. So we're the victim group. Eighty or ninety percent of adult rape victims, a smaller majority of molested children, all battered wives, are in fact women. Is that what makes our history and literature interesting? I hope not. Most women are not victims of violent crime, even though most vicitms of some violent crimes are women. Most women have still encountered, and many--I'm one--still do encounter, hostile prejudice; if we choose to be achievers, to talk or write as "thinkers" more than "feelers," to live or travel alone or at least without men, to speak out against real abuse that may or may not be gender-specific, to put men in their proper place even in our private views of the world. Women are still minorities in the highest-paid positions in most companies and in the most lucrative fields of scholarship. At the same time, in high school and college, where people pay most attention to these things, women are in no way a minority. We rule. Men want to "identify as women" not just to sneak into sister-space or be the biggest person on the team, but to get their manuscripts read by publishers who openly advertise an "open submission window for women and members of marginalized ethnic groups," e.g.
I'm a woman and I say enough is enough. In 2021 and 2022 we had a big wave of "diversity." Every publisher wanted to be able to say they were promoting some books by women and ethnic minorities. So, fine. They had those years to discover us. Now it's starting to look like abuse and oppression. It's time to stop asking what writers look like and get back to looking at the merits of books. Neither women nor ethnic minorities are going to be harmed by reopening the manuscript readings, the job searches, the scholarship contests, etc., to men who admit they are men.
Meanwhile, although nobody wants to be mean or bigoted toward anybody, why not admit that being Black or homosexual, these days, has its compensations for any hostile prejudice it still arouses. Many people make being Black or "gay" a full-time career. I see more cause for concern about
* religious people, including "observant" Jews as well as devout traditional Christians and members of faith traditions that aren't popular in the US
* people who really are living in poverty, as distinct from the majority of North Americans who are "below the poverty line" relative to our communities but are well off by any reasonable standard. There are valid reasons why people aren't sympathetic to the lifestyle of depending on handouts. There is, however, more real prejudice against people who are not living on handouts--for which they might qualify, but which they are not taking.
* Native Americans, especially those who are not Cherokee. The Cherokee Nation has been unique in many ways throughout history. They were at the front of the movement to make "Red" an acceptable "race" to belong to, partly because the land to which they were banished happened to contain oil fields. Many descendants of "older families" in the United States have some connection to the Cherokee Nation. Most of us are proud of that, these days, and have reasons to be. Meanwhile, other Native Americans who don't have oil are still dealing with peculiar disadvantages and prejudices.
* introverts, who have been and still are specifically discriminated against at some of the universities where we ought by rights to excel, who are discriminated against in hiring and on jobs, and who are socially bullied by attempts to make extroversion seem "normal"
* people with disabilities that aren't obvious or consistent, especially the "Spoonies" who are able to do all kinds of jobs, enjoy doing them, and do them well, but who become unable to work and/or unfit to be around at unpredictable intervals. (Those intervals tend to correlate with exposure to glyphosate.)
* older people who are still good at jobs where younger people and miserly employers try to push them out
* older people who think they're still good at jobs where they're not likely to be pushed out, but they are so, so not...There's a whole generation of them in the higher levels of US government, all sticking together and refusing to retire, all embarrassing their supporters almost daily. The word "Senator" originally derived from the Latin word for "old man," and it's both dulce and decorum when ninety-year-olds are still walking to work and remembering facts and names. It is neither dulce nor decorum when they start doddering in public. The wisdom we expect of Senators and their peers includes knowing when you are off your game and need to start promoting your heirs and planning your retirement. The problem is not limited to any party or position, but Nancy Pelosi does deserve special dishonor for having made ready-to-retire noises in public for more than ten years during which nobody's picked a successor for her. Anyway, these people have problems that have yet to be fully understood or helped in any way, but they need help.
Writing
How to write a synopsis:
Zazzle
They print clock faces. Here is the Official Save the Butterflies Wall Clock (leafy version):
Leafy green was a popular color for home and office decor in the 1970s. It's likely to come back into fashion, but admittedly less popular now, so here is a puddle version, more likely to fit in with newer decor, furniture, etc.:
Not mine:
What about the old favorite for custom printing, the T-shirt? The collection has black and white T-shirts. For a sale I posted a green design...I've not used this fritillary picture often, and it seemed to go with Zazzle's green shirts.
Not mine:
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