Animals
This Canadian Lynx was brought up like a house cat. She purrs and cuddles, then starts bouncing and pouncing. When a lynx kitten starts bouncing and pouncing it's prudent for humans to leave its pen.
Malaysian butterflies...not our Diana Fritillaries, Monarchs, or Silver-Spotted Skippers, but some of them look similar and fill similar ecological niches. (If Asians think of butterflies when they hear the word "jay," you knew a butterfly had to be called the Popinjay. It will be featured here if I live another five years or so.)
Child Safety, Conservatives Off the Deep End on
No question about it--sexual abuse of a small child is a violent crime. But most of the alleged child sexual abuse involves teenagers. Hello? Have conservatives forgotten being teenagers? Only the teenager involved can say whether any intimate act involving a teenager, including giving the teenager too much information, was a terrible traumatic violation or a transgressive delight. Adults can't make a simple rule like "The magic eighteenth birthday transforms a teenager into an adult capable of consenting to sexual acts." I was eighteen, nineteen, even twenty years old once and I remember that (1) I was capable of enjoying erotic sensations at fourteen, and (2) I was not in any noticeable way better qualified for marriage and motherhood at twenty than I'd been at fourteen. That was partly because our culture actively works at sheltering teenagers from themselves, not to protect the "innocence" that they do not have, but to reduce the birth rate. It was also because the human body is still growing up to age twenty-five. When life expectancy is short and societies want to maximize the birth rate, young people have always been told they were as ready for marriage at thirteen or fourteen as they'd ever be. When life expectancy is long and societies need to minimize the birth rate, we mysteriously discover that having babies before both parents are twenty-five is harmful to both parents and the babies. Well, it is, but hardly enough to justify the irrationality of treating seventeen-year-olds like seven-year-olds.
Exposure to porn does not precipitate puberty in young children. People my age should be able to remember that, too. We all saw, heard, read things, even if they were very wholesome adult-approved books about Being Born, that just didn't make sense until we were close enough to puberty to start to understand them. Depending on what we saw the effect might have been confusing, frightening, or even entertaining--misinterpreted as fighting. Adolescent hormone surges can cause suggestive phrases like "he said" or "her hair" to have emotional effects completely different from the effects of looking at a pornographic picture as a child. (Those effects, for any twelve-year-olds who may be reading this, may be described as wanting to die of embarrassment.) The search for causes of premature puberty and aging has to begin with experiences that the younger generation have and the older generation didn't have, and pop culture was probably smuttier, with more denial of the possibility that anyone might ever not want sex if it was called "love," in the 1950s than it is now. What's changed, most obviously, is the amount of animal hormones and synthetic animal hormones in the food we eat now. Then there are endocrine-disruptor chemicals, most conspicuously atrazine.
There are some important facts in this article but it's flawed by that attempt to lump seventeen-year-olds and seven-year-olds together, and by Mr. Booyens' belief that looking at porn stimulates sex hormone activity before a body is generating hormone surges all by itself. If a seven- or eight-year-old child is looking at porn and reacting to it in an adult way, parents should not deceive themselves. Even if what's going on is that the child has watched an adult looking at porn and is trying to figure out what the adult saw in it, that child may have a few years left before puberty but probably is going to reach puberty in a different way than nature intended, because child's body is reacting to biochemical influences independent of porn. (If it's a boy, he might reach puberty later, and feel homosexual or asexual, due to being exposed to more estrogen than testosterone in food and perhaps also to atrazine. If it's a girl, she might grow into the sort of mess who can listen to Ariana Grande's caterwauling and not even cringe.)
Cybersecurity
Rick Moran is being set up to support a move toward "social credit," but the reason why we should NEVER put the real name of a living private person on the Internet is simpler. Remember Friday's post about the image of the girl whose head and hands aren't even noticed, apparently wading through piles of bananas? Seriously, being female means being harassed. That's one reason why it must never be possible for all the Free Willies out there to be able to identify women in real life from what they've seen on the Internet. Yes, there used to be a witty and formidable Twit who could document that sixty-year-old breast cancer survivors, as such, are still harassed by men.
And, Moran, as even you have probably observed by now, there are people who see all of us in cyberspace as stick figures. People who'd happily shoot you in the back because you're a Republican, just as there are people who'd at least try (if they'd probably fail) to rape the Twit known as Wise Athena because she is (or was?) a woman. That is why we use names like Wise Athena, which obviously is not a real-world name, or like Priscilla King, which was chosen because it could have been a real-world name and has since been shown to be one, but which is not the name of any real person in my part of the world. For similar reasons our big corporations have names like Microsoft (not "Bill Gates") or McDonald's (not "Ray Kroc") and so on, and in fact, if people are making money in cyberspace, our screen names are the names of registered corporations too.
Historical Fiction
For those who like "westerns," a quick reality check on what stagecoach travel westward was really like. Wells Fargo stagecoaches were much rougher rides than that "Wells Fargo" TV series suggests...
Transhumanism, Steroidal
A license to spray RNA "replicase" on plants embeds a license to spray various "therapeutic" versions of "replicase" directly on humans. Hat tip to Diamond for sharing:
You can Google for more reportage, including some from corporate apologists; I recommend this if you're not neck-deep in research on other drugs, vaccines, or "pesticides" already. Anyway, whatever elected officials you have (fear it not, or should I say fear it, this will be global if it's not already) need to know what you think of this obscene proposition.
Women, Young, Pretty, On Television
Candace Owens claims to have proof for an unlikely and very offensive claim about Brigitte, Madame Macron. Why UK or US journalists need to prove this, why French journalists can't prove it for themselves if they care, I'm still not sure. So I thought she was another conservative gone off the deep end, but if she can prove it...! Anyway, having thrown into the X firestorm a few scraps of live-human-bait about Sydney Sweeney having a right to enjoy her blue eyes and the other effects of her "good genes," I might as well share this evidence that blue-eyed blondes don't have the only kind of good genes. It is possible to see the genetic merits of both blue eyes and brown eyes. Below we see Owens (a) under stress, (b) as a brand-new mother, holding up like a thoroughbred. Not since Jackie Kennedy's time has anyone done so much for a basic black turtleneck.
That she also has brains AND backbone is almost like gilding the lily. (But no worries, Sweeney, your chance to show those things--if you have them--is sure to come.)
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