So today I found links. More heavy than light ones I'm afraid.
Animals
Moths in England:
Censorship
As long as web sites are privately owned they do have a right to censor content, actually. This web site censors content. I'll post links to your site, and even write a product-supportive post to stick them under, only if we approve of your site. No "but it's legal now" marijuana products. No religious-about-being-atheist literature. So, fine, let F******k censor political content, let Youtube censor videos that tell the truth about vaccines that anyone who'd taken a single course in freshman-level health science should have known would be useless and dangerous for them at the time they were marketed, let X say it doesn't censor while it sneakily extinguishes all human conversation on its site. But where are the uncensored social media sites that offer what those sites used to offer, that should have caused all three sites to wither up and die by now? Well, actually, for people who want to sit through "vlogs" instead of reading blogs, Rumble and Discord are competing to replace Youtube; it'll happen. For people who want to post photos, Pinterest, Instagram, and Reddit aren't really uncensored, they're only smaller than F******k, but they are competing to replace The Filthy Eight-Letter F-Word. But where's the "Tweetie" site that works like the original Twitter?
One suggestion as to why Tsu and Truth Social didn't compete with the original Twitter, and why Bluesky isn't crumbling X faster: Part of what the original Twitter was, in addition to being a super-efficient way to connect with e-friends everywhere, was short. No long essays or big splashy pictures--only links to them. The middle column of Twitter fitted a good half-dozen tweets on a computer screen. I like long wordy blog posts, but Twitter was for scanning messages from everybody and finding the urgent ones fast. The 128-character limit per tweet, with the option of linking tweets into long threads, was a good thing.
Another suggestion: The world needs no more echo chambers. A real replacement for Twitter has to be hospitable to the full political spectrum, leaving it entirely up to individuals to decide whether they want to huddle in a personal echo chamber they set up for themselves, or get the benefit of reading both sides.
Another suggestion: "AI" is a cute name for the ayayai of totalitarian government by spying and censoring. It's also a cute name for the tacky plagiarism-bots that people who don't deserve to be called hacks are using to crank out really bad writing, music, and art, at the moment, but nobody's pouring millions of dollars into those things or suggesting that they need to be fed on ten times the amount of electricity the human population of a city are using. A sustainable replacement for Twitter may not be 100% bot-free, but it should encourage people to flag accounts that don't post recognizably human content, and delete those accounts.
Climate
Coming at the end of a heat wave...I think most people should be able to see through all the hype about the profitability of "energy," ask what that "energy" is needed to do, and remember that local warming is a very clear and present danger to our safety. We don't need more "energy" to fuel more local warming. We might do better to allow the Internet to work only in winter than to expand the Internet into the Orwellian vehicle of totalitarian government that Trump, poor old out-of-touch rich man, is being set up to enable.
Politics
Right-wingers vindicated? Tucker Carlson interviews a slow-talking researcher (I mean like annoyingly slow; you'll want to speed up the video until TC sounds like a Chipmunk) who makes the case that Timothy McVeigh was actually a federal agent, paid to stage a violent crime that would make the Right look bad and justify suppressing news coverage of the House investigation into the Waco disaster. It would be hard to prove her case, after thirty years during which almost all the principals in the case have died (many by violence), but her claim does put together the multitude of missing pieces that made me say in the 1990s "We can't do a FacTape on this--not yet--the story is too horrible and too weird--too many questions are still open." There's a possibility that people will believe the story Margaret Robert tells as if it were facts, just because it offers answers to all those nasty unanswered questions and people want closure. It's not facts; it's a case for the prosecution. Nevertheless.
Is it possible that leftists in our government, frustrated by the reality that most "conservatives" are not violent or even racist, are creating the legendary "alt-right" to meet their own needs for a violent enemy they need to suppress? It is indisputable. What's controversial is this claim that they went so far as to blow up a federal employees' day care center. I would urge readers to be very cautious about accusing even the Clinton administration of anything that bad. Though I can picture an undocumented conversation along the lines of "I said a small bomb!"--"They trained me to drop bombs, not build'em."
Safety
Meme from Joe Jackson:
These laws need to be reversed. Video recordings of private citizens should be limited to the private property of the person recording. Video recordings of government employees at work should be legal for their rightful supervisors, the taxpayers. A completed 1040 should authorize anyone to film anything a government employee does on paid time.
Women's Issues, Various
More than any other of her posts this one seems to explain why Mona Andrei is a popular "mommy blogger," even though her children are grown up and many of her posts can be read while eating or drinking. Not all single mothers are as successful as she was, but who doesn't like a success story?
Meanwhile, a teenage girl not unreasonably refuses to buy underwear in a store where customers are pestered by a pushy salesperson, who in this case is one of those men who identify as women for the purpose of intruding into women's space. Her mother and various local celebrities make her complaint a Cause.
I understand the girl's feelings. At the same time I wonder whether some men got this idea from incidents that started in the 1970s where businesses that provided rather personal services, from fitting clothes to urological surgery, would be p.c. and hire women and try to shame men who felt that their modesty was being violated if they were served by these women. ("What kind of woman would even want to be a urologist?!") Those men had a valid case, too.
Next link that turns up: a woman plays the part of Jesus in a musical. Unburdened by any sense of historical authenticity, of course. Respect for the audience's knowledge about the time and place she's trying to reenact would dictate that in solo scenes where she might be portraying Jesus in prayer, she'd be wearing a longish tunic with full-length sleeves, a sort of shawl over that, and an elaborate head scarf. as worn in slightly different styles by men and women. Her costume is what only the twentieth century, when fabric became cheap, would ever let anyone call formal costume; throughout most of history such a dress would have been recognized as rags and tatters, and we are specifically told that Jesus' followers made sure He never had to be seen in such disgraceful attire--at least not until He was stripped and scourged. So the costuming is all wrong. And we're not told that Jesus was left alone between the scourging and the pronouncement that He was dead. And if He screamed like that during that time, it would have been only natural, but we're not told about it. Whatever that woman thought she was enacting with that performance, it's no part of the story of Jesus.
"Demonic"? She can't help being skinny, which Jesus may well have been; the body wrapped in the Shroud of Turin was tall and gaunt. She could nowadays have watched video of her performance in rehearsals and seen how much her hunching, reaching, and shrieking resembled traditional portrayals of ghouls, rather than a suffering Savior. For that she's much to blame. She's not, of course, trying to drag anyone into deep water or drink anyone's blood, but surely it's possible for her to strain for high notes without gesturing as if she is.
Credible? No ordinary human ever has played or will played the part of Jesus credibly. The best Passion Play I ever saw recognizes that fact and requires the actors to mime around Him; most theatre groups can't pull it off, but when it's done it's awesome. The best actors can do in ordinary reenactments of the Crucifixion, I think, is to walk through the role of Jesus without really trying to convince the audience that that's who they really are; merely reminding the audience what He said, and how terribly He was hated for it.
Is her lifestyle Christian? How many Christians have asked that question about men who've played the role of Jesus? Has anyone ever been told "You cheated on land deals, you cheated on your wife, you drink till you fall down in the road, you're fifty years old and still have unpaid student debts, you have such an uncontrolled bad temper you can't even keep a dog, or whatever, so you can't carry the Cross in the Passion Play"? It's a bit late to start sniffing at the crotch of a woman playing that role, isn't it?
In legitimate theater tradition anybody can play anything. Race and sex don't matter. And we're not specifically told that Jesus had fair skin, though we are told that His ancestor David was distinguished by a "blond" or "ruddy" complexion; a prophecy that might or might not have described Him mentions curly hair. If we with our current sense of "race" saw Jesus, we might not agree on whether to call Him Black or White. So yes, I'd say that a Black woman could play the part of Jesus, but I'd expect her to play it in a better informed, more respectful way than that one did.
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