Microsoft behaved very badly this weekend. Some links have probably been lost forever. I think we need a law that if they crash your browser they owe you $1000, and if they lose your links, bookmarks, or history they owe you $5000.
Charity
The "gifts" that give charity a bad name...
Cybersecurity
I have no concern whatsoever about machines becoming "smarter" than humans. I do have some concerns about what humans can use computers to do to each other. None of these short items qualifies as news any more, but icymi:
Foreign Affairs
"Become a State"? Canada could easily be our 51st through 63d States, inclusive, but is that what they want? The ones who've said anything to this web site definitely want a change of administration, maybe as dramatic as the one for which we voted last year, maybe more so, but they like being their own nation. The position of this web site is that statehood should be within reach of those who want it, even if they're not on our continent (viz. Hawaii), but it's un-American to press it upon those who don't want it. The President's joke about this was not funny.
Health
This one's not really news any more, either, but it's worth sharing with all those who prefer to read their news in French. Basically, too many vaccines can be as harmful as too few for babies. The expectation that babies will be put in day care facilities, where infectious diseases run wild, has led to the recomendation that they be given too many vaccines. The writer doesn't actually say "Babies should stay home with their mothers and be naturally fed for the first year," but that's also true...
Politics
So why did we vote the way we did, Michael Moore?
Possibly because there are nuances to these questions, and people's votes can't be predicted as simple yes/no answers to the questions politicians want to believe they'd answer the politicians' way.
This web site, for example:
Supports legal abortion, with no questions asked, until incubation technology makes it possible for aborted fetuses to be kept alive for longer than it takes them to go home, suffer, and die. But that day is likely to come, and when it does come the fathers should be sterilized and set at hard labor to pay the costs of rearing and educating their children, up to age 25 or as far through university as the children may want to go. Meanwhile, sterilizing fathers of aborted fetuses and setting them at hard labor would still be a good idea.
Is maintained by more than one person, though it's lost two founding members. Some of us shoot, some don't. If you are an evildoer who knows how to read, you do not want to find out what those of us who don't own guns use instead.
Wants fewer gun control laws, because we have too many laws already and more paperwork is never a good idea.
Believes climate change is real, though local, which means that whether or not it's become a crisis is a local question. Believes the reality of global climate change is not knowable within one human lifetime. That doesn't mean it may not be happening, but it means that we don't know whether it's happening, how it's happening, or whether any governmental policy will do as much about it as the Green choices individuals can make all by themselves.
Supports the right of workers to form labor unions, join them when they find them useful, and stay out of them if they find that the unions are becoming just another tier of management and/or misusing the money workers pay into them.
Believes that even the rich are overtaxed already. We need a more frugal government. The federal government should be on a schedule of steady downsizing, with termination--with prejudice!--for employees who have behaved as if they had power over the taxpayers who have employed them. (Shoot a taxpayer, like those guys who were finally fired after the Waco disaster and then quietly rehired? Face a firing squad. Utter a taxpayer's name aloud in a government building where others might hear you? Clean out your desk, and good luck on the day labor site.)
Understands why people think they want to raise the minimum hourly wage, but is made up of people who've lived long enough to know that raising the minimum hourly wage never improves the minimum wage workers' financial situation. On the contrary. (Michael Moore has lived long enough that he certainly ought to know this, by now.)
Supports decriminalizing marijuana, or at least decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana. Smoking anything indoors, or in any situation where others have to be within a hundred yards of you, should be listed as a violent crime.
Wants student loan debt relief, but not in the form of not holding students responsible for paying it off, in cash or labor. A better alternative would be to deflate the cost of education...possibly just by publicizing the idea that intelligent people aren't the ones who go to expensive schools.
Sees no reason for Supreme Court term limits, though some Justices, like some elected officials, do seem to need some system for making it clear that they've reached their personal retirement age. I'm all in favor of people doing their jobs as long as they can do them well. Our previous President was a very public example of someone who, even before election, was losing the ability to do his job well, and consequently did it badly. I'm not aware of any Supreme Court Justice having combined a frail, brittle appearance with a long sequence of bad decisions to any comparable degree, but it could happen.
Thinks some people want "pre-kindergarten" daycare for valid reasons, and those people should offer it on a private basis. Private funding does not lead to mandates. Public funding does.
Supports an end to the discrimination against the unmarried that led people to think they wanted same-sex marriage.
Has never reached a firm decision about the electoral college.
Does oppose gerrymandering (the practice of redrawing district lines in bizarre, salamander-like shapes, as done by Elbridge Gerry long ago, in order to break up districts with a solid majority of one party and bring in more of the other). We last saw that done to bring more coal miners, who tended to vote D, into our State House district in the hope of weakening Delegate Kilgore's staunchly R positions. Did not work, but it's worked in places where elected officials had solidified less political power before it was done.
Thinks a cease-fire in Gaza would be a good idea, just as soon as the Palestinians who want to live have rounded up the Hamas goons and anyone who insists on supporting them, delivered them to the Israeli government, cursed them, spat on them, and defiled their graves. Any Palestinian state recognized by civilized people needs a record of having solidly rejected rape, baby killing, and any form of violence against non-combatants. For several years...too bad for Palestinians who want to be their own nation in this lifetime; they should admit that Hamas has torn it. This web site has Arab relatives and Muslim friends. To them this web site says, sorry, they need to be denouncing Hamas's terrorist acts as un-Islamic.
Thinks that in Heaven it might be possible to separate money from politics, or separate human or post-human existence from both, but on Earth it won't be. Deal with it.
Is written by a woman, consists mainly of women, and also has a majority of legally White biracial members, but if anybody thinks that either being female or being "of color" is a reason for supporting either party, well...that person is living in the 1960s. Which is sad. Especially when the person, like too many of the miseducated Millennials, never even did physically exist in the 1960s.
Thinks support for any further "progress" in the direction of socialism is evidence of unfitness to vote. We can talk about maintaining some of what we have, but we need less socialism, not more.
Psychology
Naming no names...some correspondents of this web site could benefit from this reminder. And then scroll down, or up if it's been long enough, to our Petfinder posts. There are Petfinder pages for all US states and I have searched and found a few pages for Canada and Mexico.
Technology
Microsoft wants to force obsolescence on even more computers that should still be functional. Don't let them. It's not really news, but you can still endorse the message:
Personally, I think they should be required to uninstall all traces of Windows 10 and reinstall Vista or ME. And also clean up, renovate, and resell all the old desktops and laptops that have been wasted, before they're allowed to build any more new devices. And also commit to "One computer per lifetime." And pay cash any time any uninvited "security update" affects the way anything works for computer owners on their computers; if you barge into someone's house, uninvited, and break things, or even move things around so that their owners can't find them right away, you certainly have to pay; cyberspace should have the same law.
(Which does not seem to be what the President wants...Donald Trump is a brilliant man in some ways and also has areas of real stupidity, and the authorization of technological proliferation he's allegedly backing shows one of the latter. Let us all pray that both new and existing surveillance technology will malfunction, like the exploding electric cars, in ways that quell enthusiasm for adopting dangerous new surveillance technology.)
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