I counted my online to-do list last week. It had 1900 items on it, and that was counting e-mail as one item! Now it's down into the 1500s...well, 1583. But yes, these link logs are on the list.
Books
Regular readers of HowToMeowInYiddish.blogspot.com already know...it's actually been over a year since a series of science fiction stories, featuring hostile alien robots that were caught and reprogrammed, appeared on that site. They're still in the blog archive if you dig back. They were clever, warning but not too scary, featuring likable young characters. Well, now the stories have been polished up into a book, In the Tenth Year of the Pandemonium. It's easygoing, whimsical, thought-provoking. fresh--OZ and ZO aren't like R2D2 and C3PO, they're memorable in their own way--and meant to see readers through lots of morning commutes, with food for thought all day for those who want it. It is currently FREE to subscribers to Kindle Unlimited.
See also under "Health News," below.
Communication, Bad Examples of
Abortion is, in statistical fact, something that (1) Loony Left weenies think their girlfriends can always get because they're sooo not ready to get married and be fathers, (2) social workers want teenagers to do when the teenagers' intention was to quit school, and (3) Rush Limbaugh used to claim about twenty women on Earth thought was "liberating," but I don't think he ever supplied names. I could be wrong about the names. Anyway, if you want to reduce the incidence of abortion, here's what not to do: Make it painfully obvious that you're just really upset with God having ordained that all males start out as little blobs of ickiness, similar to tumors, growing inside women, that all males owe their existence to women, and that no male ever gets a turn to be the arbiter of life and death for a fetus, WAAAHHH! Greg Byrnes could have made this point a little more succinctly if he'd just lain down in front of a video camera and kicked and screamed.
What to do? Try building a culture where having the baby won't be an obstacle to moving forward in the woman's career later, where having a good guilt-free life rearing any babies a woman has conceived is seen as more of an achievement than having all the newest stuff, where DNA tests are used to identify and neuter the fathers of aborted fetuses. Or just put your energy into adopting one or two unwanted babies.
Communication, Generally
I try to begin where at least one intended reader is. That guarantees some content is going to be beyond some people's level of understanding. Actually I don't worry about it, but...
...and Candidate Dowdypants looks as if she watches television while she's too drunk to remember whose show she's plagiarizing.
Election 2024
Archetypal cat lady painted by Lucy Almey Bird. Put a computer on the table and books on the shelves, substitute a long flat bench for the vintage chair, and you'd have a recognizable caricature of the office room at the Cat Sanctuary with the stacks of papers tidied away. And last night on the screen porch, listening to J.D. Vance talk about reuniting the population, this cat lady sat up and applauded.
Glyphosate Awareness
Bayer rolls out an even newer and deadlier version of "Roundup." They had to; nobody would use this year's "Roundup" twice on their own property, though I have a neighbor who, last week, sprayed it a half-mile away from home and drove back fast. This time they've taken out the glyphosate, to which "weeds" are rapidly evolving immunity while trees and humans die from cumulative effects, and replaced it with four more chemicals all known to be toxic to humans. This time someone's tried to quantify how much worse the new formula is.
What bewilders me is the writer's clueless whine about "developing safer chemicals." That's totally barking up the wrong tree. If chemical "pesticides" seem to be "safer" this year, they'll be less safe and less effective every year thereafter, because that is the nature of chemical "pesticides." Some lose their safety and effectiveness ratings faster than others, but nothing that you can spray on plants to kill them, even the amount and concentration of saltwater that would be needed to spray a field, is really safe for humans and there's not yet been a confirmed case of chemicals rendering a "pest" species extinct, either. What Bayer needs to do, while it still has a little money left, is develop safer ALTERNATIVES TO SPRAYING CHEMICALS. Portable water boilers are probably the best idea. I liked the idea of building cute insect-sized robots, small enough to run through wheat fields, that could sense specific weeds and "eat" them; those would be great fun to design and build and also to deploy, but boiling water would be much cheaper to maintain.
Health News
If you're a typical baby-boomer, you don't know much about whooping cough. "Didn't that use to be, like, a childhood disease, and wasn't it wiped out by the miracles of vaccine and Herd Immunity?"
Well, no. It was the childhood disease we didn't have. Measles, mumps, and chickenpox were part of our childhood. Whooping cough wasn't. Whooping cough seemed to have been defeated by the DPT vaccine, which so many of us had without any unwanted effects, Denial existed back then, too. Some people had seizures. Some people died. In the late 1980s the CDC finally admitted that the effects of the DPT vaccine on a small minority of baby-boomers, probably nobody you knew, had been as bad as the effects of having the three diseases, together. But whooping cough was not eradicated from the Earth. Pediatricians started giving children a different vaccine against the same diseases...and whooping cough quietly came back.
Once again school districts are trying to demonize parents who don't want their children to have a vaccine that most of them have already had, so don't need.
(Should children just be left to build immunity to this disease in the good oldfashioned way? Diphtheria and tetanus were deadly diseases, but people used to live with a peculiar kind of cough for about a month, usually in childhood, and be immunized to whooping cough by having it. I don't know. I think I could respect a child's right to choose in this matter, but I'm not sure I could get through a month of listening to a child cough for a month. I don't think most of today's parents can do that.)
Here a doctor who's not in collusion with Pfizer discusses why the new DTAP vax, which has replaced the DTP vax we had, is less effective and not necessarily even safer. Long story short, it doesn't touch the actual bacteria; it actually sabotages the immune system so that nobody has to listen to the children "whoop."
The position of this web site is, if a so-called vaccine does nothing about the pathogens, save your money.
Here's another way young parents should probably save their money:
I just ordered this e-book, haven't seen it yet, to update all the stuff I remember from a different time. With age and experience we absorb useful information about lots of things. Some of that information, on topics like the vaccines currently recommended for children, the inflation of tuition fees and debt incurred by students, etc., has become about as useful as the television schedule for the summer of 1974. Aunts and grandmothers need to stay in touch with what the younger generation are actually dealing with this year. So, here is a summary.
Candidate Dowdypants claimed to have worked in McDonald's once. People expressed doubts about this. Candidate Graying Orange went into a McDonald's and was allowed into the frying area.
He looks as if he sooo needs more fried food. Anyway, yes, I believe this probably is the next chapter in the story...no proof, but the Mean Girl's fans are serious haters. We've already seen that. It's reaching the point where even No-Drama Obama, that gracious gentleman, should probably protect his image from being seen with those awful people.
History
There is a book of paintings that document unusually rainy, green weather in California before the awful over-development and smog. I've raved about it here before. There are local people who would like to buy it. There is an heir to the painter's estate who is interfering with its publication due to greed and thickheadedness. He does not realize what an achievement it is to add some awareness of the rest of the world to Virginia's legally mandated Virginia-centric view of history. (Virginia high schools used not to count history courses taken in other States toward high school graduation.) He thinks art books are written by just stacking up paintings and scanning them into a computer. He thinks conscience-karma won't come out and GET people who exploit writers. I hope this web site can help him with that. The writer he is failing to compensate is not young--nor is he.
Meanwhile, a little more broadening of our historical consciousness: What went on in Canada in between Wolfe-the-dauntless-hero and the Fenian idjits? (It would be pleasant if more schools in the US taught Canada's history and geography as extensively as their "good" schools teach ours.)
Hurricane
The Petty Family Foundation has decided to raise funds for Christmas treats for North Carolina survivors. They've not really got their web site up yet, but you can sign up to receive notification when they do.
Video of a drive around Asheville:
What becomes of Asheville as a scenic and historic city should only happen to Washington and New York, as scenic and historic cities, next. Local people want to rebuild? Burro-crats should clean out their bank accounts. Their turn will come.
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