In which your Auntie Pris takes up arms against the evil Microsoft "Update" Gremlins and ventures forth to reclaim some small fraction of her e-mail and blogroll, to find links and cute things for you...Well, the first thing that needs you attention, that I found, is not cute. It's an evil bill before Congress. Anyway, they're all in alphabetical order by topic, below...
Communication, with Elected Officials, 101
1. They get masses of messages. The system is set up for that, and they do need to hear from their constituents, but short and simple are good. Postcards are better than letters. (The US Congress have received enough letters with nasty things in the envelopes that they now subject all letters to an automated process designed to destroy nasty things before anyone sees the actual letters, which means a letter may not arrive before the vote on the issue it addressed.) If you've kept a Twitter account you can send them a tweet instead of an e-mail. If your official seems to need a lot of facts and documents, put them below the basic yes/no message and resign yourself to the possibility that they may not be seen--unfortunately, the way the system works, "Do the majority of my constituents say yes or no?" often is more important to an official than "Why do people say yes or no to this?" It never hurts to let an elected official know that there are facts on your side, but it probably does more good to educate other citizens about the facts than to try to give a Congressman a crash course before tomorrow's vote.
2. Messages will probably be read, possibly by some dear little student intern. All messages to elected officials should be fit for delicately nurtured teenaged girls to read. Disagree and clobber them with facts, when necessary, but don't use bad language.
3. Because of (2), there's no need to make messages fancy; try to make it easy for the student to file messages as pro-this or anti-that. Realistically, all the elected official is likely to have time to do is compare the numbers of messages from each side.
4. And many Washington offices still use phones, because they make it easy for Congressmen to tell who is or is not in their district, so if you still have access to one it's nice to give them the phone number.
5. A lot of the messages elected officials get are "howlers," usually typed after it's too late for them to do any good even if the senders had mindfully intended to do good. Sometimes officials set up coping mechanisms like asking the student "What's the worst thing anyone's called me today?" By and large they ignore the howlers. Dare to be different. Even if the subject of your e-mail is "Vote NO on" something the official is likely to like, it never hurts to do a little preliminary research. (You're reading this on a computer, so you're part of the global elite who can do the research and write better letters than Schmoe Sixpack.) Has your official voted on similar bills before? What have the effects of per votes been? Is it possible to thank or congratulate person? It never hurts to sound more like an informed, sympathetic observer than like a slob who sends howlers to elected officials as a sort of emotional surrogate for upgrading to a better job.
6. Technically, even though residents of the other forty-nine States and St Croix Island may want to thank Marjorie Taylor Greene for her tweet (linked below), she's not supposed to read messages from outside her district while in Washington. But there's no rule against linking or copying her tweet into whatever you send to your US Rep.
Communication, with Family
Are people my age really so bored by the young, so fast?
I think what we have here is a politically motivated effort on the part of the commercial media to drive a wedge between demographic generations. Never mind that, although five years of war followed by the early Waste Age's economic boom did produce an identifiable baby-boom generation, there's been little consistency about subsequent generations; different families had different numbers of them. The adults in the US are clearly inclined to favor fiscal conservatism. The very young still think socialism might be able to work, at least long enough to get them entrapped in whatever dystopia the transhumanists might be able to achieve. So people with bad intentions want to turn the very young against their elders, to tell students that older people don't understaaand anything and don't caaaare any more and can be ignored...
What the older people in the TikTok video are saying is "We've finally been able to park and get off that hormone cycle! We gloat! We don't want to hear about your little emotional feelings any more!"
Well...Parking the hormone cycle and getting off is a wonderful feeling. Women who suddenly find ourselves free from four days of messiness and three days of anemia out of every month, especially, can hardly be blamed for rubbing it in, a little. More astute women at least complain feebly from time to time about their greying hair, so young people can live with their envy.
I'm not very sympathetic to young people with Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I do at least listen when they're honestly frustrated by the sluggish employment market or disappointed in love.
Economy, The
Fellow Americans, your US Reps need to know what's wrong with what somebody's tagged as the Genius Act. It's an evil Genius. Tennessee's Marjorie Taylor Greene sums it all up on one computer screen:
Fantasy, Sick, the Transhumanist
In the 1980s we thought the Cold War was over, and we'd won, yaaaay. Wendell Berry and fans hoped that we could move on to a more useful Green-vs-Greedhead debate about how to use resources. Some people, however, dream of going beyond the old Marxist dream of Party bosses functioning as kings and everyone else as "proletarians" (like peasants, only without land). They want to function as God and let everyone else be their "creations."
I don't think it can work; I think there is a real God, Who takes a dim view of human hubris, and will make sure the transhumanist fantasy doesn't work. I think the question is whether we can recognize items from the transhumanist agenda and prevent them happening in a pleasant parliamentary way, or whether we'll fall for the bad ideas and suffer the destruction they'll bring.
Here's a documentary movie for those who absorb information from movies:
It explains why the value of, e.g., my old clunker of a fixer-upper truck has actually sextupled in the last three years. You want all machines you use to be "dumb." If it's "smartened" with a chip somewhere, leave it in the store and look for an old secondhand model that was chip-free.
You may, as I am, be impressed by the efficiency with which new technology allows diabetics to monitor and treat their condition. Your main concern, like mine, be "What happens when the gadgets break down?" You should also be aware, though, of the probability that, when a critical number of active senior citizens are wired up with digital sugar/insulin monitors, someone might decide to free up funds for this expensive treatment from the budget by delivering fatal sugar or insulin shock.
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