First the apology. A comment on last week's poem, which linked to the Petfinder post, was that it took far too long to get to the pet pictures. Well, it does. I thought it was long even while writing it; the comment has convinced me that it's unconscionably long. I was trying to write two posts at the same time, and it showed. It should have been two separate posts. It is not as if this web site has no down time to make up for with extra posts on the same day. Point taken. I'm sorry, and will try not to do it again.
Now the links:
Disasters
Google has loads of links to what we can hope will remain the big weather disaster story of the season. Browse "Texas flood updates" to find the latest ones. Beth Ann Chiles, writing from Brevard, shared this post where Sean Dietrich speaks for most of us...Trigger warning: you will probably cry.
A comment from Steve From Rockwood at smalldeadanimals:
"
As the spokesperson on the radio said yesterday, you need a warning system, you need people to hear the warning system and you need an evacuation plan that doesn’t put people at risk. Much of flash flood alley doesn’t have cell phone reception and some of the people who died were trapped while trying to flee. It’s a complicated problem. And the next tragedy won’t be a flood. It will be an earthquake, tornado or hurricane. And the region (wherever it happens) won’t be ready for that either.
"
We already have an Emergency Broadcasting System, for what it's worth. It seems to me that connecting it to high-water sensors ought to be within oilmen's budgets, but I've not actually done the job, so what do I know.
What we can know is that life is uncertain. There'll always be a first time for a natural disaster that's never happened in the place before. (Flash floods on the Guadaloupe River last reached serious proportions about fifty years ago.) It's possible to say "In the future, we'll have [whatever seems relevant] to reduce the chance of this happening again." It's not possible to say "It's all [name of person]'s fault for not having done something to prevent this before it happened."
There are newspapers that, if President Trump walked on water, would report it as "Trump can't swim"; some people seem to enjoy the partisan mudslinging, it doesn't seem to bother Trump, and it's tedious to people who think about the issues on a survivable level. But if people want to blame Trump for not having foreseen that something nobody was talking about even last week might have saved a life somewhere, they need to think ahead. Are they going to blame their politician if whatever-it-is turned out not to save someone else's life, some other year?
Misogyny Resurfaces
It's funny because he's going so far out of his way, and missing an important point...Jordan Peterson tries to reclaim the misogynist element in "Snow White." Men are nice to young women, older women are the enemy, and especially older women who tell young women not to have babies at fifteen...and although it's a silly old story, not the Bible, that's not even the point the story makes. The three points Peterson misses:
1. It's not that all older women envy Snow White and wish her ill. She had a loving mother who died young. Why did so many medieval monarchs die so young? They hadn't yet inbred to the point where dying young was euthanasia for many of them. They died young partly because they were in a Dark Age of medical ignorance, and partly because, when power is inherited and thought to be bestowed on the heir at birth by God, the easiest way to remove people from power is murder. Right after the good mother dies, the wicked queen becomes the stepmother. This might be construed as a symbol of the way left-wing feminists make more noise than the more conservative ones who actually get things done, but for the German peasant who first told the story it was probably a more general symbol of the fallen moral condition of humankind. Even before they were Christians German people had a very clear sense of the moral imperfection of this world. (They thought that bad people spend the afterlife in a place of endless damp and boredom.) Anyway, good older women exist, but their influence may be undermined by bad ones.
2. The dwarfs don't represent patriarchal power; they represent ordinary decent working people, as Peterson says, but they don't wield power. They are miners, not no-hopers who are overworked and underpaid to make the mine owner rich, but co-owners who work in their own mine. Like some real miners, they prefer cleanliness to dirt and spend their after-work time scrubbing themselves and their home clean. They live together as brothers. None of them has a mate. None of them dares to aspire to marry Snow White, even when she's working for room and board in their tidy little house, because she's a princess and they are commoners. They might even be said to represent good men properly subordinated to superior women, though again, that's probably not what a German peasant intended. The first teller of this tale probably just accepted that the natural order of things was that some people were royal and others were subjects. Anyway the dwarfs have accepted that they don't have enough power in society to act on what, if they're normal young men, was on all of their minds every time they looked at Snow White but suppressed by awareness that their brothers would punish any of them who even mentioned it. (Unlike some other species of "little people" in folklore, German dwarfs are normal humans with at least one mutant gene, for short stature, and sometimes others that are more dysfunctional. The seven brothers seem healthy enough that Snow White could have married one of her housemates and possibly even had a normal-sized, good-looking child. But that would have been considered a sin against God, Who had given a princess special, royal blood.)
3. In the original story it's not even the prince who saves Snow White. It's the servants, more ordinary working people, who give her glass coffin a good shake and dislodge the poisoned apple. (We think of a Red Delicious apple as sold in US supermarkets and can't imagine an apple stuck in a person's mouth not being obvious to anyone looking at the person. Medieval apple consumers were less finicky. They ate medlars and crabapples. This apple wouldn't have been much bigger than a crabapple.) Disney removed the wedding because modern sensibilities didn't want Snow White to wake up from a coma and go "Oh, you're a prince? Well, I'm a princess, so we must marry each other at once." The original storyteller didn't do that either. But again--when the dwarfs, lower-status working people, couldn't revive Snow White, it was higher-pay-grade working people who did. It wasn't sex, or Romantic Love, at all. It was actually carelessness as opposed to the excessive veneration of the beautiful princess in the beautiful magical coma (so much less messy than the real kind). Shaking might even have represented a socially acceptable kind of punishment as a corrective for the worship-like treatment that was not reviving the woman. If the apple represented education, and the coma represented an ivory tower sort of job for which a young woman might be respected but avoided by people who don't feel fit to make conversation with her, the shaking-up that saves her might represent harsh reviews. And, in any case, although we may imagine that after all this time Snow White wanted a baby and got one, the focus of the story is on the time she spent working and learning life lessons before she even let herself be kissed.
But Peterson's analysis of "Snow White" is funny, and insightful...if we accept that our species of primates has reproduced too successfully and we all need to limit our reproductive activity, and the easiest way to limit the number of babies born and also provide better homes for those babies is for people to postpone making babies until they can afford houses with a separate room and garden for each one. Older people who say this are not opposed to grandchildren. We simply observe that cousins who get together once or twice a week can fill a house with childish laughter more efficiently than overcrowded siblings can, with fewer childish tears. And, if people genuinely enjoy the company of children, enough to consider adopting the ones who are not "White Newborns," there's unlikely to be any shortage of children to adopt after having our one-or-none. We want the human population to decrease in every generation until it gets back down to optimum levels. Breeding fewer and healthier babies is much nicer than the alternative the male mind tends to favor--having as many babies as possible and letting the surplus be killed by war or diseases. We want there never again to be "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Every child deserves to breathe free.
The bottom line is that nature has given males a pathetically brief role in the reproductive process--they're disposable, their whole biological role lasts five minutes--and their irrational, hormone-driven thinking has always led them to think that this means they need to make multiple babies. Rationality, supplied to them by women because the female reproductive act lasts at least ten years, tells men, no, they must beget one baby or none and then justify their existence by working to feed that child. And how the male mind kicks and screams against this self-evident truth! It is hard for them to kick against the goad. They have to grow up and listen to the help, in the sense of guidance, God deemed meet for them in the Garden of Eden. Lower their eyes and listen to the words. That's the only way they'll ever stop acting like poor dumb animals and become the sort of legitimate patriarchs people want them to be. As Lewis put it, God may have given every husband two crowns, but one's made of paper and the other of thorns.
(Failing to make a clean, printable transcript of his video speech is yet another way Dr. Peterson reveals how, though brilliant, his mind is still limited by testosterone damage. He thinks everyone ought to have time to sit through a video speech, when God has given us the ability to read printed words and given the less disposable half of the species even the ability to enjoy it.)
Testosterone Poisoning
Trump and Musk have so little in common, it's surprising that they got along for as long as they did, but they need to put their hormonal feelings aside and cooperate like responsible adults. It might help Musk to bear in mind that Trump is old. It might help Trump to bear in mind that Musk is young. Anyway, as an aid to the President's memory, someone needs to remind Trump of his own threat to become a "third party" candidate if Republicans insisted on nominating a candidate who was actually a Republican. After that they can remind Musk that what he's threatening is a bit of "monkey see, monkey do."
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