Status Update
There really has been no excuse for the dearth of posts last week. I've been doing things other than blogging, but I had a lot of pre-written posts to pop out of "the can" for days like these. I apologize for forgetting to pop them out.
Anyway, these links go live early because the petitions need to be circulated this morning.
Animals
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about the difference between carpet beetles and bedbugs. Both are small insects; that's the extent of the resemblance. Reddit's "identify this insect" page gets enough requests to identify carpet beetles to have set up this page:
For those who like subtle, neutral colors, some beautifully subtle early spring moths from England:
The moths that ate wool as caterpillars are also beautifully subtle, but they're smaller and usually roll up their wings so that their pretty wing patterns can't be appreciated. Probably nobody would like them anyway. I think it's not very public-spirited to let them live, but often unavoidable; they're small and move fast.
Education
Larry P. Arnn, president of one of the independent colleges, makes a case for calling sunset on a federal law under which the quality of "higher" education has been lowered. (His school, Hillsdale, offers many "free" virtual courses. You still have to make the time and buy the books, and the course material probably won't count as major, minor, or core requirements toward a degree program, but for those who enjoy online learning they'd be a great bargain.)
Family
There's truth in this one--I'm thinking of a man who died recently. His father was a competent storekeeper, and stayed active and healthy for a good long time. This man was a "son of" into his seventies. When he finally took over his family's properties, what I remember best is that I wanted to lease one, and his face lighted up. "It's a fixer-upper but you ought to like it!" The building didn't even have a roof. Seriously. The door opened and you were looking up at sky. Well, he'd often seen my Significant Other and me buying supplies to fix up places the Significant Other had bought as investments, and he knew one of the Dozens of Cousins was a roofer. So he was clueless enough to think that he was going to get me to pay to let my menfolks fix up his property, and he was going to keep the said property, all fixed up, free of charge! He kept the store just long enough to pass it on to his children. In Bible times, if parents lived beyond age forty, the custom was that they retired, gave the farm or business to their twenty-something firstborn, and let him take care of them, to prevent that sort of thing.
In North America the descendants of immigrants who brought in epidemic diseases have tended to feel that there's always going to be plenty of space. Parents can be the "big tree" or "big fish" for as long as they like! Children can go somewhere else and be the "big" ones there! Billy Graham's heirs have written frankly about having to carve out their own niches within their father's ministry. I can relate.
A girl I used to baby-sit has grown up letting beauty be her only talent and not doing anything notable with it. Well, she was born with a talent for music, but she lost her hearing at an early age. She did a lot of other things well enough to earn B's at school, and no better. Some older relatives of hers were recognized as doing this and that other job well, and she didn't want to try to compete with them. Her mother sent me copies of some short pieces she'd written at school--things adults might have published with pride. About that time I sold a few short pieces of hack work. She never wrote anything worth sharing again. She married young, was a full-time mother, was divorced, and now sits around in government housing, watching television and muttering bitterly that "In any other family I could have been 'the smart one'." Even in her family she might have accomplished something if she'd ventured out on her own. While I was in Washington I remember her mother dropping hints about the prospects for her there, and I wrote back that she might have better prospects in a smaller city. She never tried.
So...should farmers step down and let their heirs take over farms while the farmers are still active and healthy? Is that what it takes to develop some heirs' abilities?
Gardening
At least a small part of every property needs to be addressed this way. The writer assumes that the reader is not trying to raise any annual or biannual crops. This is a good approach for fields that have been cultivated for six years in a row, for the front border of a yard that faces a road, for a shady dell where there's not enough sunshine to produce good crops of fruit or vegetables or flowers...You want pollinators and natural predators on the rest of the land. Here's how to maintain their garden space.
Glyphosate Awareness
You were, or someone close to you was, harmed by glyphosate. You are, or that person is, still being harmed by "New Roundup"--my glufosinate reactions turn out to differ from my glyphosate reactions in being (1) harder to spot at the beginning, (2) more painful at the end, (3) with more tissue damage and loss of blood. Although most of our reactions have been much easier to link to specific chemical exposure than cancer ever will be, the thinking has been to let cancer patients sue Bayer first because they're likely to need the money more and have less time left. Bayer has been quietly paying damages, after as much heel-dragging and cheating of cancer patients as possible, since 2018 while continuing to market its poisons to pay the costs; this strategy is finally starting to hit its intended target--and Bayer's corporate reaction has been to lean on State officials to try to get laws written to protect Bayer and other corporations from having to pay damages when they knowingly manufacture and sell products that kill people.
Some States' elected officials have, this web site is glad to say, ignored Bayer's efforts. Regrettably no State's elected officials has gone on record as having invited Bayer to sink in a pit. Eleven States are considered battlegrounds where officials seem to be taking Bayer's obscene proposals for protectionist legislation seriously. The eleven States are Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wyoming.
Gentle Readers, I can't even write to the elected officials in any of those States. I'm not one of their constituents; if I send them so much as a postcard they're supposed to have instructed the students who handle "routine" mail to throw it in the recycling bin. Those of you who live in these States have to write to your people, yourselves. There are webforms you can use online, or you can send them postcards with your real legal names and addresses on them if you want to chat. (Most elected officials prefer postcards to sealed envelopes; many like to have a full-time staffer chat with correspondents.)
Here's the webform for Tennessee; GMO Free USA has separate ones for the other ten States. It's a two-page form, with a detailed report to read on page one and a sample letter you can rubber-stamp or edit, as you think best, on page two.
Here's an article about how a government office, which has actually been audited for not doing enough to regulate toxic chemicals, is coming under attack as chemical companies whine that it's interfering with "critical chemistries" that allow them to make money while giving the surrounding towns cancer:'
Political Philosophies
How socialist, globalist, Poison Green ideas are failing the working class, both upper and lower, in Europe:
How many times, how many ways, must I say it? There are poor people who will sit around watching television, or picking their noses when the television's gone, whining "More, more, give us more," as long as anyone else has anything at all. (In the US they vote D.) Then there are poor people whose plea is "If you can't give us good jobs, give us a fair chance to set up our own businesses, and stand back." (In the US we vote either I or R. It can be a difficult decision. Ds like at least the idea of poor people, as long as they play the maggot-like role the D worldview assigns them. Rs don't like to think about poor people at all.)
In the generations before the baby-boomers, most people in the second group figured "I paid in to Social Security; might as well draw that money out again," and accepted pension checks, while continuing to work. Baby-boomers may not have that luxury. I did pay some money into Social Security, though by the time Obama was elected I'd lost the records of how much and just said I'd paid none. I don't plan to draw out any "retirement" money from Social Security. The population must not grow any more--it must decrease. For future generations of humans to live decently, the young have to choose to have one child or none. That means that there will be more old people than young people for a few years, and it will not be feasible to try to tax the working generation to give every old person a "retirement" pension. At best we may be able to keep on paying disability pensions to those who need them. The good news is that old people live longer, and enjoy it more, when they don't "retire"--at least not completely; they may do less work, or lighter work, or volunteer work (such as tutoring their grandchildren), but they have something to do every day. That's my plan for the future and, middle-aged readers, I hope youall will consider making it yours. After age sixty nobody needs to work eight or ten hours a day to climb a corporate ladder or support a baby; we can afford to "work" as the artists, philosophers, pure scientists, inventors, and mystical hermits we wanted to be in college. But we should work. Keep that safety net there in case we need it while recovering from broken hips or adapting to blindness. I want Social Security to evolve gracefully from an unsustainable Ponzi scheme to a sustainable disability pension fund; one thing most seniors can do toward that end is not to "retire." Or, if we must retire from young people's jobs, retire into jobs old people can do and enjoy doing.
Women's Issues
I noticed something, over the weekend, while reading a book site's sales pitch...
Books by, for, and about women interest me. I don't expect to agree with every woman writer on every point, but I expect a certain resonance between her and my points of view.
Books by, for, and about "non-binaries" don't fascinate me, but they interest me in their way. I expect very little resonance between their and my points of view. I expect to learn something about someone different from me.
Books by, for, and about men may or may not interest me, because I already know that a substantial number of men are capable of filling books with things that I understand yet find boring, like sports statistics. Still, men have their right to write, either for each other or for a general audience that includes me, and although I don't often see their art imitating the part of Nature that I see as well as women's art does, some men's books are informative. Or funny. Some men write well
But an advertisement for books "by women and non-binaries" really turns me off, because the two groups have little in common and the purpose of these books can only be to exclude men who are comfortable in their own bodies. It's like saying "The wit of Dave Barry, the wisdom of Wendell Berry, the lucidity of C.S. Lewis, the insights of William Shakespeare, the poetry of John Keats, the independent thought of Carter Woodson, the academic rigor of Thomas Sowell, the wackiness of Douglas Adams, the fortitude of Martin Luther, the public spirit of Thomas Jefferson, even the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are not welcome here. Because. Somebody. Is. Envious."
This is Women's History Month, not "women's and trans folk's." Get your own month, trans folk. When women aren't celebrating being women, with breasts and uteri and the life experience of being harassed, bullied, and even physically attacked by men, most of us would rather be in a mixed group with our men than in a mixed group that not only excludes our men but is all about excluding them.
So where do we draw the line? Must a line be drawn? We could just go by body shapes. Or we could say that, if it looks male, or needed major surgery to stop looking male, but it keeps yammering about its claim to be called a woman, it is a big fat testosterone-poisoned male.
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