Links and two rants.
Communication
These videos were posted for the benefit of the Christian Left. They can serve the Christian Right equally well.
The advice to job seekers is particularly provocative. Body language is easily misread; when I'm at home alone, or here on this screen porch, I draw in around the computer, then stretch and spread out, in a cycle that repeats a few times in every hour. The pattern of movements changes significantly when temperature and humidity change. I stretch more in sweaty weather and add movements that center around the heater in freezing weather. It has nothing to do with other people, except that I have been known to point both middle fingers at the screen if it blinks as if it were trying to snap an unauthorized picture...I may in fact feel weaker when hunched over a desk or a garden row or a handful of sock knitting needles, and powerful when I stretch, but I can't say I've ever actually noticed. Actually, when I've been hunched over the computer in a writing trance for hours, I feel as if I've been flying on one of Anne McCaffrey's warm-blooded, warm-hearted dragons. But if you readers feel a need to remind yourselves that you're able to defend your theses or competent to do a job, you might want to try stretching in the bathroom first.
Anyway, as an independent contractor I feel less stressed by interviews--usually done at the beginning of the first work day, where it's much harder for employers to waste my day and then hire someone else!--than people who are trying to convince a total stranger that they want to work for a corporation where they probably, in fact, will not want to work. I think this is a bigger consideration than people usually want to acknowledge. Brains can be injured, and can recover, just like the rest of the body. The speaker's IQ score dropped after her injury; by now it's probably back where it was, maybe higher. For her there really was a time when she had to convince people that she was able to do what she'd been doing and training to do for years. Most job seekers don't really have that kind of reason to reconsider whether they are or can become competent. Sincerely religious job seekers, however, do have reasons to reconsider whether they want to become "the best fit for the job" in other ways.
Do you want to work for an organization that lobbies for more restrictions on property rights?
Do you want to work on computers that will be used to direct planes to firebomb fishing villages, or synthesize new chemical compounds that will kill some of the test subjects who volunteer to try them as medication?
What about a hospital where the last thing they want is a nurse who sincerely cares about patients, because a research hospital where patients and families never receive a bill is the place where they test the new compounds that are going to kill some of the patients, and the testing process may require a treatment to be given to a hundred patients even after the nurse has watched the first fifty patients die?
Even if you have been seen in church on Sunday, respect other people's right to go to church on Sunday, and think companies like Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby are doing a good thing by giving all of their employees the same day of rest the employers take, do you really want to work for an organization that gives everyone Sunday as a day of rest but might, for that reason, demand that you work on your day of rest? (Members of the Seventh-Day Adventist church are encouraged to quit jobs for that reason. I never quit a job because I was asked to work on Saturday; I'm not a member of that church. I did tell some good steady employers that if I worked for them on Saturday it would be on an unpaid volunteer basis, as community service.)
What about a department store where managers are expected to model what's in the "women's fashions" department, and everything there violates your standards of ethical self-advertising? (Talking to you, J.C. Penney, and the year all your "dressy" women's shoes had hooker heels. I've not bought anything at J.C. Penney since that year, either.)
It can be hard to find a position an ethical person wants to "become." I wouldn't go so far as to say "Whoever would be a man (or a decent human being) must be an independent contractor," but at my no-BS pay grade that does seem very close to being true.
In the 1980s when jobs were Out There, I answered lots of ads for "full-time career jobs," said frankly "I'd like to try this on a temporary basis, as an odd job," did the job for a few days, and either did it for a few days again later, or never went back. A few people asked, considering the jobs I kept for a long time, "You seem so content with such a menial job...did you have some sort of mental breakdown and become unable to use your education?" I did not. A more relevant question, for more job seekers and working people I expect, would be "Isn't it a source of spiritual relief just to paint walls or wash cars or stock shelves, rather than be part of an organization that works toward a despicable goal?" It is. I worked for some very interesting people, as far as I could ethically go with them--including a group whose goal was to strengthen the UN into a potential global government. (Briefly.) I had the opportunity to know and love some people whom the world remembers, if it does, for political statements with which I disagree. I am my own person and only ever managed to convince either myself or the interviewer once that I actually wanted a full-time career job with an organization--that lasted for a month or two. What I could convince myself and them was true was, and still is, that I can do one single, simple, objectively evaluated task to a higher objective standard than other people. That's true, and that's all I try to believe at least until I've worked in the same place for a few years.
Glyphosate Awareness
First a word about chlorpyrifos, one of the other poisons greedhead farmers knowingly inflict on humans.
We've seen the document already, but a few new bits of news about its reception are now available. Viva Mexico! Viva Sheinbaum Pardo!
Morality
We had a big national quarrel about same-sex marriage. People vented emotions they attached to their opinions about its being moral or immoral to have homosexual relationships. That never was the point. The point is that we have laws, written in a misguided attempt to get people to formalize their marriages the other parents of their children, that discriminate against single people. Some people attached emotions to the opinion that bachelors are all young, promiscuous, selfish people. Well, some bachelors are young, promiscuous, selfish people. Others are not. However, our discrimination against single people does not penalize young bachelors so much as it penalizes older people. It kicks in when people need extensive medical care and when they die and leave behind property. It penalizes the conditions of illness and widowhood, not the conditions of selfishness or promiscuity. And half of all married couples are going to be widows.
By letting the homosexual lobby distract our attention to the handful of people who actually wanted same-sex marriage, we tolerated, and legalized, and formalized, and perpetuated, discrimination against widows. I was talking about this nineteen years ago because I became a widow prematurely. Now more people are noticing that they, too, are likely to become widows and that we've set up laws that deliberately discriminate against widows.
Here's a young woman arguing that friendship is as important as sex is. Well, to the young and fertile, it may not feel that way. When we're building our nests, hormones fill us with emotional feelings about our mates and young. But reality is that, later in life, sex hormones subside. Most of us become postsexual. Postsexual adults may still feel that the parents of their children are their best friends. That's the ideal outcome of marriage. About half of all postsexual adults, however, outlive the other parents of their children. Their children may or may not be their best friends, or their caretakers. (Some people feel that it's indecent to receive nursing care from their children.) So, whatever our beliefs about sexual ethics may have been, they're not very relevant to the question of who supervises the hospital and nursing home staff, who does any home nursing that may be needed, or who gets the house when people don't leave a big estate but do leave a house, or a car, some petty cash and paraphernalia, to somebody and the people they know are venal enough to quarrel about who gets what.
People in Maryland let themselves be told that common-law marriage was unethical in some way. It is no more ethical or unethical than church or courthouse marriage. People who choose to waste the money can have a courthouse wedding today and a no-fault divorce tomorrow. A big church wedding with all the traditional expenses may help people stay together, or it may not. More relevant is the question whether people are in fact best friends and do in fact have enough emotional maturity to endure the misery of being each other's home nurses. Many people are not and do not, and calling their sexual relationships marriage does not create either the emotional bond or the emotional maturity that is not there. The wedding party that celebrates good intentions becomes an especially bitter memory for some people; the individual some adults hate most bitterly is the ex-spouse of their youth. It would make better sense to celebrate the fact when people who have or have not paid for a certificate of marriage have actually stayed together for seven years, or ten. Even that does not necessarily prove that those people are each other's best friends; we recognize no-fault divorce as preferable to murder.
But even when people have big church weddings, the morality of the situation is that people have a right to designate their own Significant Others at the far end of life, regardless of their long-ago sexual choices. They may still be married; they may be the half of the couple who dies first, and by the time they die, their beloved spouses may be wheelchair-bound. They may be widowed. They may be old selfish bachelors who never even wanted to share a bed with another human being. And it may have been raining where they were in 1962, or it may not. And they may or may not own a T-shirt advertising a music festival. None of that makes a particle of difference to the questions of who does the home nursing, who stays with them in the hospital, or who gets the house. (The virtuous wheelchair-bound widow may not want the house.) Everybody reaches the end of life in a different situation, and has to answer those questions in a different individual way.
We need laws that preemptively rule out any attempt on the part of any government to meddle in these personal decisions; that establish a right to autonomy (the individual's right to choose medical care and caretakers) and to privacy (the individual's right to choose when to disclose details of medical conditions and estate plans). This is a moral issue. It needs to be reconsidered regardless of whether or not the person has ever had sex with anybody under any circumstances.
It needs, specifically, to exclude government officials as potential heirs or caretakers.
Property Rights
We all have to choose our focus--or be chosen by it; glyphosate chose me. For those who want to get back onto property rights:
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