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Anthropology
DNA studies suggest that some Anglo-Saxon settlements were matrilineal. Possibly matriarchal. They didn't leave much evidence either way.
Other settlements, more prosperous ones where people were buried, sometimes with possessions, show that both men and women owned property; prosperity and status tended to increase with age.
Is your mind "seeing" what mine "sees"? Today, poverty pockets of our society are sometimes described as de facto matriarchies, but they're not the peaceful, prosperous beehives women might hope matriarchies would be. They're places where men have little to contribute to family life. Men may be encouraged to go somewhere else to hunt for food, fight wars, or take jobs, or they may just be sucked into a parasitic "street culture" where young men's contribution from society ranges from scanty to negative. Women are left to rear their children alone. Being unable to depend on one man, a woman may have multiple open-ended relationships that leave her children not knowing who their fathers are; at this level of social degeneration matings between cousins or even half-siblings may be tolerated or seen as inevitable. The group as a whole is poor, and likely to be in decline. And, when men try to live with their children and those children's mothers, women and children are often abused. "Matriarchs" in these groups may be respected by their own children and grandchildren, but not by men, nor by women who manage to keep a man at home.
History in fact records that Roman Christian missionaries recommended setting up patrilineal, patrilocal, patriarchal social structures in the hope of giving lower-class men some sort of responsibility, and keeping their wives and children from depending on the church for food. Eventually these structures were set up, and better-off women complained bitterly about becoming less able to depend on their own resources without husbands. We're still undoing the damage that discrimination against women has done, but most of it was justified, when it was done, as necessary protection for women who weren't able to succeed on more equal terms. Rather like the ethnically based discrimination built into today's "diversity policies."
Computers
Photo most recently shared by Neithan Hador at the Mirror. Google traces it to somebody on Reddit but doesn't have the person's screen name.
Oh. Oh! Oh, take me back! It was Internet-independent and it worked like a dream. Of course, if connected to the Internet it was slow...but not as slow as certain shiny new laptops are when Microsoft is throwing its "update" fits. Five minutes hardly seems like much of a delay in opening a web page any more. And when disconnected from the Internet, oh, how they ran. I can tell that that's not the one Helene zapped, last fall, in my office, because it's still running Windows 98, which was what the Perfect Toshiba used to run. The good desktop computer always had Windows ME. And I want a federal law requiring Microsoft to stop trying to sabotage those vintage computers. They can always melt down a few Androids for replacement parts. Microsoft never has done anything better than Windows ME, and never will, and should stop wasting people's money even trying to pretend.
I had finally figured out how to transfer files from floppy disks to a stick drive, before Helene, but when I consider the mess Microsoft has deliberately made of this shiny little laptop...oh how I miss the whir of a floppy disk in a computer that was not as shiny, or as versatile, or as fully loaded as the new ones are, but at least it was the best its designers and makers were able to do.
Food
This article? Meh. I think he could be a little more specific, and less of a starry-eyed optimist, and communicate better with people who raise their own food and people who need encouragement to start. Nevertheless, the article contains links that may connect that audience with people who can offer more specific and realistic advice.
Politics
Would Trump "win" (even in terms of partisan political gamesmanship) by letting Gabbard and Kennedy lose?
My answer: No.
Photo from Euronews.com.
The word that comes to mind is racist, but even my White mother used it, and it does seem peculiarly suitable, considering the way those pale eyes and eyelids almost glow, in some photos, above the shadows painted along the cheekbones. If Trump fails to stand by either Kennedy or Gabbard, in my native dialect the word for what he'd be doing is "white-eye."
It means to cheat or betray somebody in a way that can be compared to the way the early US government did the Cherokee Nation. It connotes something like "to earn the wrath and curse of God, so fully, so shamelessly, so egregiously, that people will want to be a thousand miles away from you because they expect that at any moment the toilet will drop out of a passing plane and land on your head."
I don't doubt for a minute that, if Trump turns against Kennedy, who brought in the swing votes (like mine) and won the election, Trump will be consumed by something he is probably not capable of consciously recognizing as guilt, but it will destroy his brain, just the same. His new photos make him look much more like Biden than his older ones did. If he turns against Kennedy, he'll find himself very soon looking worse than Biden. And sounding worse than Kennedy. And twitching worse than Muhammad Ali. The chemical pollution he will have dumped Kennedy in order to avoid dealing with may well be the instrument of his vestigial conscience's revenge.
If he turns against Gabbard, bing go the vestiges of credibility he's built up among women and ethnic minorities. Even if he turns against Patel, who is hated by some, arguably for better reasons, he loses ethnic minorities. Patel is probably the one without whom he can survive, but he'd be extremely unwise to risk losing even Patel.
Trump has a hard job ahead of him just keeping the diversity of the new fiscally conservative coalition that elected him, and he'd do well not to compromise. Not hiring people as tokens just because they belong to minorities, of ethnicity or gender or opinion or anything else, is a good idea provided that it's backed by not using any excuse not to stand by them. Trump's role model as a President was the King of Tacky because he showed no loyalty to people he hired. Trump seems to benefit in some ways from making tackiness a brand, but he can't afford to be tacky to women and minorities. Including the Irish-American minority.
I don't think the Republican Party is likely to benefit from Vance inheriting the Oval Office, at this point, either.
Psychology
Regrettable truth: Urging people to "forgive" other people who have not repented, "for your own good," really is the psychopath's line. We can release the emotion of anger...but I think we as a society would be better off if we agree: Offenders do not, ever, get to control the process of any forgiveness that may be offered to them. They have to repent. And this does not mean only getting down on their knees, foreheads touching the ground, and begging "Please forgive me. What I did was wrong and I'm in no position ever to judge whatever anyone else did. It was my fault, my most grievous fault." It means physically acting out repentance by doing whatever the victim says will make up for the offense.
Most offenses can, of course, be atoned for by just saying "I'm sorry," because nobody thinks they were premeditated offenses. Nobody gets up in the morning and says "I'm going to cut three people off in traffic today, close the elevator door on someone's face, misspell the name of the first person to whom I write a letter, drop a stack of file folders on someone else's toe, and spill coffee on another person at lunch." A person who did all that might be referred to a neurologist, but nobody would blame the person, even if the coffee ruined per shirt.
Many, if not most, of the offenses that people brood and anguish over are not even real offenses. People spend many expensive hours talking to psychotherapists in order to bring themselves to confront the truth:
"He makes me look bad, on the job, merely and entirely by doing better work."
"I've known and loved her longer than him, but I haaaate that he likes her more than me."
"Nobody from that demographic group has ever done me any real harm, beyond the 'microaggressions' built into their being different from me, which are in the same category with the offenses-caused-by-carelessness-or-clumsiness. I never even met anyone who'd been a slave, been in a concentration camp, even had their ancestral land stolen--or if I did it wasn't ethnically based. In fact, I know, some people from that group have been helpful to me, or at least friendly, or at least they've tried to be friendly. I just resent that they're the dominant group."
What these people need, right there in the therapist's office, is to confess their resentment as a way they have harmed themselves, and repent to themselves, and try to forgive themselves. Most of them have done little real harm to anyone else, but a lot of harm to themselves.
Then there are the offenses that have dragged on for years, long-term relationships of abuse, and when they've been real physical offenses the offender needs to expect to spend years repenting. Companies that manufacture poisons shouldn't be able to pay fines and roll on with their business--they should have to sign over shares of stock to the people they've harmed (or their survivors), the upper level employees should have to beg those people for jobs or references daily, all of the employees should know that their pay's been frozen because all profits are going to the people they've harmed. ("And the first condition of your employment, Albert (Bourla), is reenacting the initiation of Kunta Kinte in Roots.") People who've been embezzling money for years shouldn't even presume to ask for forgiveness until they've repaid every penny.
Readers of young Liv's post are not told exactly what Liv's mother did to her. It doesn't sound like beating, rape, or starvation. It sounds like a habit of verbal abuse that reached an all-time peak when the mother waved her hand and spilled some coffee, once. Once you realize that verbal abuse is a habit, is the only way some people know how to express what may have been good will toward people for whom they feel responsible, the actual offenses fall into that majority category of annoying things people do through carelessness and being too close together. But we know that the mother is unforgivable (at this point) because she's trying to demand forgiveness, and that's not how it works. An offender who tries to control the process of forgiveness is offending all over again.
Speaking of envy, poor old Anna Wintour--the arch-yuppie who's been envied by so many for so long--just broke down and spewed a boil-full about Melania Trump.
Marrying a twice-divorced older man for his money is its own punishment and, although it's not a choice I'd recommend to a niece, I'm not sure that anyone needs to add to it. Nobody really asks girls like La Melania to do anything but be gorgeous, but she has done. She's loyal, intelligent, and tough.
Whereas recent photos chosen and published by Anna Wintour show her to look like some grandma who has little contact with her grandchildren, but a generous financial settlement from the divorce, as seen at beaches in Florida and California, baking their bones and never going near the water. Hard to blame her for feeling envious. But envy's not pretty, Anna, dear.
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