Animals
English moths--some "closely related" to North American species, none really bi-continental. The camouflage effects on some of these moths, and the blogger's ability to photograph them clearly, have to be seen to be believed.
A foul-mouthed person using the screen name Cheezburger has video showing that a cat family have adopted a mouse. The mouse's willingness to be adopted by cats, some commenters have pointed out, may be a symptom of toxoplasmosis, which seems to affect humans only if they're pregnant females.
Housing
There are theoretical benefits to packing more people into stack-and-pack "apartment towers." Most particularly, crowding reduces fertility while, if not relieved by a decreasing birth rate, it also raises the death rate. If we value human life, we need to encourage the young to have one child or none when they have a decent house to rear a child in, and ban all construction of new "towers."
Encouraging the young to have half a dozen babies, in conditions where those babies will not be able to thrive, does not express reverence for life. It expresses that evil old European view that poor people reproduce like fleas and are equally disposable. Reverence for life teaches us to make sure every procreative act really invites a new life into a world where that life will be cherished. There are all kinds of ways to express love; just to yank the guys' chains I'll suggest cleaning the bathroom floor as a good one, but the way that makes babies should be reserved for times when it really is about love for the potential babies.
Landscaping
When people didn't get something they wanted, sometimes they attach themselves senselessly to some other thing that seems easier to get. Governor Ron DeSantis, being unable either to rally as much popular support as Trump or form an alliance with Trump, seems to be showing a reaction that suggests he might not have been a better President than Trump after all. He's wasting paint to paint over the decorative displays people have put inside crosswalks. I've never liked the homosexual lobby's grab at the rainbow as a symbol and sometimes wished the creationists would reclaim it, but the whole kerfuffle seems less about any cultural values, of any kind, than about a defeated man's emotional feeling that "This is something I can control." Bickering with fourth grade students about painting hearts on pavement in memory of a child who died of heart disease? Grow up, Governor. Please.
Men, Picking On
When this web site picks on men it's always in a lighthearted, jocular way. Seriously, I like men. In real life I've enjoyed working with men. I do not actually want those of The Nephews who are, literally, nephews to be put at an automatic disadvantage relative to the ones who are nieces. Nevertheless. Facts are facts. So far as it's possible to tell, female followers of this web site vastly outnumber male. All people who've bought books from this web site have had female names. All purchases of my Zazzle merchandise have been made in female names. All long-term writing contract clients have had female names. And all the men at this web site have been related to at least one of the women by blood or marriage. Obviously a lot of the men in cyberspace are only here to watch movies, play games, or sell tips on how to get rich quick, but men are also more likely to be, even at sites that identify as "communities," the ones squealing "Me, me, me, read me!--I don't have TIME to read anybody else but ME-e-e-e-e!"
I had not given this much thought until I read a Substack by someone using a female name who, if "she" was really female, certainly seemed to be making an effort to play up to male readers at female readers' expense. Is that really what it takes? Do men read women's articles and blog posts only when the topic is how much those women hate older women? I didn't think all those working relationships with men were based entirely on the look of a body that's not visible in cyberspace...well, at least one of those men was blind...Let's just say that although I've found abundant reasons to like men in real life, I've found little reason to like the majority of those who identify as male in cyberspace.
One easy way men could boost their ratings here would be to become more noticeably supportive readers and followers. Not only of my work, either. Of women's work generally--nor would I think less of them if they were more supportive of one another.
North Carolina Update
No word is available on the lady who talked to WCYB-TV last week. Best case, she's living with relatives and doesn't want to embarrass them by going on TV again. Some other people were evicted for valid reasons--confirmed to be involved in drug trade--but that one was evicted because, allegedly, she "wasn't doing enough to find another place." I remember once having to leave a sublease before the primary tenant moved out, thinking there wasn't a room left in town, and the very last person in town knew someone who did have an unadvertised room I rented for three months. I hope the WCYB-TV correspondent had similar good luck.
However, there are reported to be people who qualified for FEMA flats but have yet to be able to move into one. Some of them have been living in hotels, on disability pensions and credit cards, for a year now. Best case, they (or some of them) can move into the places the dopers are moving out of. I'm still waiting for status updates on them.
Weather
When I looked up the official list of hurricane names, before closing the tab I had to scroll down through the list of retired names and associated statistics.
You've heard that "more severe hurricanes are being caused by climate change"? That might be true, but if so, it's a slower pattern of climate change than the globalists know about.
Obviously the costs of hurricanes, in lives and money, depend on the specific places they hit. Some measurements of damage reflect how unprepared people were, or how much money had been spent on human activity in a particular place, rather than how much wind, rain, and lightning were observed. The "category" system of measuring the meteorological intensity of hurricanes does not correlate particularly well with the amount of damage they do. Hurricanes have tended to grow steadily more expensive because people have spent more money on things hurricanes can damage, and prices have inflated, so replacing the same thing cost more in 2020 than it did in 1950.
But if we look at the actual weather record...
...the proportions of melodramatic storms to relatively less dramatic storms (that still managed to do a lot of damage) haven't changed much over the years. The most furious winds that ever whirled over our continent, so far as humans have been able to measure and record these things, whirled in 1980. The 1950s saw two hurricanes about as deadly as Katrina; in 1998 Hurricane Mitch racked up a higher death toll than any half-dozen other hurricanes you remember, together. The overall incidence of dramatic storms is similar from 1950 to 2025. The incidence of very high wind speeds and very heavy rain is similar too. There have been individual years when more storms reached sizes and wind speeds that put them in the "hurricane" category than in other years; notice how many more names beginning with A through M have been retired relative to names beginning with N through Z. There have in fact been records for Weather Awfulness that were set before hurricanes were given human-type names, that remain (thank goodness) unbroken. There was in fact an unusually high number of hurricanes that reached the Northeastern States in the 1950s. Some of the reasons for these weatherquirks may be related to human activity, but we don't really know how.
Women's Issues
If you disagree with anything J.K. Rowling said in this post, you may be a feminist, and you may even be female, but yours is not a viable form of feminist thought.
Focus on women's concerns does not mean lack of sympathy for the concerns of any other demographic group. Women can and should sympathize with truly gender-confused genetic chimeras and with people whose probably chemical-induced hormone imbalances are making them feel gender-confused. We can and should sympathize with men. And children. And gerbils. And left-handed Chinese sweatshop laborers who can't get lefthanded machinery into their factories. We don't think about only women's issues all the time. Whenever and wherever we hear or read complaints that make us think "I would not like to be in this person's situation, and even more I would not want to be the person whose abuse this person is complaining of," we should sympathize with our fellow lifeforms. It is not OK when people start talking about "trans shooters" as if trans people with "Prozac Dementia" behaved differently from gender-typical men and women with "Prozac Dementia" (they have not). But their concerns are not women's concerns. People who don't have enough XX chromosomes to have developed female body parts may share some concerns with women but they don't need to be telling actual women how to do feminism, any more than women need to be telling them how to address whatever their own specific issues may be.
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