Books
Mary Holland wrote a book called Turtles All the Way Down that exposes corruption in the vaccine industry. It didn't start out to be an anti-vax book, although that's the way it tends to come across. It was meant to be a pro-science book. To say that COVID vaccines may be more dangerous for most people than COVID is in no way contradicts the observation that rabies vaccines are healthier for most people than rabies is. There's a wide range of risk/benefits ratios, and what the Children's Health Defense group is calling for is closer attention to where vaccines fit on that range.
But then somebody using the name "Mira Holden" wrote a book called Turtles All the Way Down that attempts to defend the vaccine industry. It attempts. It does not succeed, because, if you're paying enough attention to these things to have any business reading the book, the plagiarism of the cover design puts you off reading whatever "Mira Holden" had to say inside the book.
This article about the two books is recommended for not-very-charitable, yet coffee-snortworthy, laughs:
Madhava Setty was charitable enough to leave room for "Mira Holden" to reuse any facts person may have collected in a new book, printed under its own title and its author's own name.
Censorship
I can only recommend the abstract--the original site behaves too badly--but this could save the Internet:
Google...
For contract reasons, we don't post rants like this on Google-hosted web sites. And we've not seen that "ios" business with the reversed shift key in the list of traffic sources to this web site, anyway. My understanding is that "ios" is one of those stupidphones this web site recommends not using.
But we do link to rants like this:
If you have a web site, especially a business site, that gets or wants traffic from "ios," you must read.
History
Poor Jasmine Crockett thinks White people were never enslaved as prisoners of war. She also seems unaware of the prison camps in Germany, the Soviet Union, and other countries that had socialist revolutions within living memory. In Cuba, in the 1950s and 1960s...I suppose she thinks all Cubans are Black? It was after they dragged the men outta their homes and shot them, in front of the women and children, they made the women and children work. Or emigrate, if they could. Which is why the predominant language in some parts of Florida does not sound exactly like Mexican or even Puerto Rican Spanish. I think Congressman Crockett needs to go back to school. Grade four or five, by the sound of things.
Meme
I found it on MOTUS. Since I'm aware of bogus quotes proliferating on the Internet and I'm not familiar enough with any translation of Kant to recognize when and where he said this (or something like it; English was not his language), let's at least try...Google can't find this. I have no idea whether or not Kant can be translated as having said this. Anyway it was a good thing for whoever said it to have said.
Frex. I wish these people had had the common courtesy to write down their words, but what e-friends shared last night were these videos. I have no way to check their facts, but by the mouth of two or three every word shall be confirmed...Sigh. I am aware that this is the way fake news spreads. I believe it's true for some people in some places in an extremely large country. And I have neither the time nor any inclination to do the book's worth of actual physical research to determine to what extent these news reports actually support the point I think, on the face of things, they support. This is just something to think about.
Purely in the interest of blocking illegal drug traffic, which is by itself an indicator of blockage of legitimate economic freedom, several countries are announcing bans, delays, tariffs, etc., on products imported from China. And blame for COVID-19 has nothing to do with this, nothing at all. Right.
Other countries are more than delighted to step into the position of manufacturer of the world's mass-produced cheap products.
Chinese people have by now spent their whole lives being told to let their government take care of these things, whether it could or would or not. Their government might have some strategies in mind, but meanwhile people appear to be in great economic distress.
Socialism tends to have these effects. People can't sell legitimate products, they sell banned ones, they get blocked. Revenues, such as they are, from remaining legitimate sales are supposed to be doled out impartially to everyone. Somehow that doesn't work. So then what happens? In some countries where socialism produced economic crises, but censorship was not imposed, people were able to benefit from pen friends and e-friends in other countries. Zahara Heckscher rallied a lot of support for Zambia; the resemblance between the very social street cats at a cat sanctuary in Venezuela and my former alley cat clan, raising the question whether social behavior in cats is in any way linked to genes, led me to publicize a cat sanctuary for which other US Twits are still raising funds on Twitter, or X, today. Chinese people certainly have the ability to do things Americans would be happy to support. They have traditions of music and theatre we'd pay to watch; they have literature, though very little of it has been translated into English; they could post photos and videos of what their charities are doing as well as anybody else can. But, because of censorship, they're not able to raise the funds some of them individually deserve.
Why do they have censorship? Because their government fears that the truth will kill it, as a government. And? So? Let it die. Let all governments, all political parties, all churches, all corporations, who fear that the truth will kill them as whatever they are, die as whatever they are. Only those who can survive the truth deserve to live.
Poetry
Some churches are ruined because people stop using them...and some people stop using churches because the buildings fall into disrepair. People don't feel reverent in a building that's full of black mold. They don't feel warm and fuzzy in the vestibule of a building that's chilly. And then they may lose their church's history; they may move to a different building and lose people who live further away from that building, or be unable to find a new building and lose their fellowship altogether.
Remember that Culture of Repair idea? If you live near an old church building that attracts mostly poorer, older, or minority-type people, it would be a very good idea to consider whether those people want help maintaining their building.
When I went to Seventh-Day Adventist meetings, I remember a lot of talk about the fact that, although the big White church downtown typically wanted to expand its membership by bringing in the little minority-type church, letting the denomination do something more profitable with the old building, the people attending the smaller church typically wanted to keep the building (and the social group, and the order of service) they had. Traditions don't move easily. Neither do geriatric parishioners who benefit from going to church in their neighborhood, but might not benefit from trying to attend church further away, as it might be because they need to stop driving.
So, why not add a little prod to this lovely poem about a lovely ruined church:
Shopping
Scalzi's gift guide continues. You can still follow Monday's links; the links will probably stay up all year if you save the URLs and dig back through the archives.
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