Christian
For those who may have missed it: Don Lemon, a former news reader, now has nothing better to do than lead a mob to run into a church screaming that people weren't real Christians if they weren't opposing the deportation of Somali-Americans, chanting the name of the homicidal motorist Renee Good, and (as the Christians filed out and the mob chanted) yelling an attempt to "interview" a minister who was clearly torn between wanting to witness to his faith and wanting to throw Lemon bodily out of the building. Tina Toon's graphics show the general physical types of Lemon and the minister.
It's hard to tell to what extent left-wingnuts actually believe their own rhetoric. The way they angrily reject any possible solution to any problem they are emoting about other than what their party demand suggests that they don't believe any of it, but it strains the imagination to believe that so many people can be such frauds. They want the Somalis to be a beleaguered minority of second-class citizens, they're not hiring or trading with any Somalis themselves, but it's possible that Lemon's mob had avoided seeing the evidence that Good was threatening a federal agent's life and believe the agent just randomly shot her. And it's possible that some of the Somalis, who show clear evidence of physical damage from what they've been through and may have equal or greater brain damage, won't have good prospects of survival in their native land even after its civil war is over. It is just possible that Lemon perceived his desecration of the church as emulating Jesus' attack on the moneychangers. Poor fool.
Libraries
Didn't we all use to love libraries? And haven't they changed since the turn of the century! There were some heroic holdouts, but year by year I saw more of the holdout librarians retiring and being replaced by parrots who all squalled, "Libraries should be more than quiet places for reading books! They should be community centers!" Out went most of the books; if they looked new they obviously weren't being read, if they looked used they were "worn out"; when new books were bought they were often inferior and the selection showed obvious attempts to push a political agenda. Out, specifically, went books written for people who had or were working to have what used to be called "education"; literary classics, primary documents of history, books about English or any other topic that were "on a college level," books in other languages, and also a lot of books about how to do things. When I'd worked in libraries I'd never really liked rearranging the madly popular Chilton's Car Repair Manuals--there were dozens, of course, and they were bulky books and were always being consulted and put back out of order; out went the Chilton's Car Repair Manuals. "Information in books is out of date! People can get their information from the Internet!" the parrots screeched. By now we all know how well that works. Libraries are places for information that, over and above concerns about privacy or national security or blah blah, needs to be instantly available when the electricity goes out. Libraries need to be non-electronic.
People who objected to the destruction of community book collections were usually stereotyped as wanting to censor libraries' collections. I want to be clear about this. I'm an adult, I've read plenty of adult content, and I think there's nothing public libraries need to hide from adult readers. Literally nothing. Libraries should expand and form branches, like Starbucks; there should be one in every neighborhood and, with computer networking, every branch library can have its own collection. There can be collections that are separate from the main collection and circulated only to adults. There should be books that represent political and religious minorities. A public library should be an introduction to its community, and if members of its community want to donate the complete works of Mary Baker Eddy or Mary Daly or Leroi Jones or Lyndon LaRouche, the library should lovingly curate those. I don't think libraries should be asked to handle books whose appeal to male sexuality is so strong that the books are returned with stains and odors, but the best way to identify those books is to accept everything that is donated to the library in good condition and discard what is returned in foul condition, when and as that happens. What I objected to, and still object to, is the disappearance of valuable books. I don't care if libraries acquire books I consider loathsome. If anything they should stock Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries and The Anarchist's Cookbook. I do care if a major city's public library system isn't keeping even one copy of a book by Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson or Henry David Thoreau.
I think the best filter for public library collections is a tight limit on new book purchases. Most library books should be donated by private members of the community who have read them and thought they deserved to be shared. Librarians can and should read the library journals with the lists of p.c. books the Parrot Trainers tell them every library needs, and they can buy and donate those books just like every other citizen. Libraries should be community projects, not top-down, dictatorial institutions, and beyond the classics every library is likely to need, the contemporary book collections should show only 20 to 30 percent overlap between any two libraries.
I think more of the critics of the politicization of libraries should draw a clearer line--as the authors of the article linked below fail to do--between public libraries and school libraries. School libraries are not for the general public; they are for students on specific levels and, as such, should stock books that are appropriate for their levels of study. University libraries should focus on academic subjects at a university level, including scientific journals. High school libraries should focus on classic texts that encourage teenagers to begin to think, with perhaps a focus on encouraging them to think more and emote less. Elementary school libraries should collect books for children of the ages that attend the school, with a focus on books parents want their children to read and on screening out content that might traumatize children--some information about how people are born and how people die, but no graphic description of either process or of the passions that might be involved. University libraries can and should stock material about every kind of human sexuality. Primary school libraries should limit sex-related content to a couple of books that mention the visible differences between male and female bodies. Middle grade libraries should have a couple of the "Darling, You Are Growing Up" sort of books but, in the interest of reducing harassment of children who don't fit the usual pattern, references to "non-binary" bodies or "alternative" sexual preferences should consist of "Some bodies develop in different ways. For more information about that, you should talk to your doctor."
I think one way libraries can operate within reasonable budgets is to stick to their mission and avoid branching out. A library is a place for books. Every public library should be able to get audio books and Braille books, and more books should only be available in those forms, but most public libraries should stick to printed books. A library is not an employment service, not a day care center, and not a political action group, and should lose funding if it allows librarians' personal interests in running those things to distract either space or money from its purpose of providing a quiet place for reading and study. A library can curate items that aren't books, that people want to borrow and then store in a public place--maps, cameras, tools, toys, works of art--but that should not be allowed to interfere with the quiet study for which libraries exist. "But more people will come to the library if it includes a cafe, or day care programs, or movie nights, or..." Yes, and undoubtedly even more people would come to the library if it sold beer. A library should be funded only to provide a quiet place for people to read and study books. Extroverts should be charitably discouraged from looking for work in libraries. Extroverts who visit libraries should be trained to understand that they are in a minority and must conform to the behavioral expectations of people who belong in libraries. People should meet and make friends and network at libraries...in the traditional way, by passing notes to the people who interest them inviting those people to talk to them outside the libraries.
This article barely skims the surface of the issue...
But people who like books and reading haven't been talking enough about the problems. One must begin somewhere.
Quilts
Alana Mautone shares three new quilt photos, plus a link to previous quilt photos I missed.
Weather
Ahhh, that cozy global warming...
I asked the cats if they wanted to go out at 6 a.m. They did. They had their fur on. I didn't want to know exactly how cold it was outside. I can always Google the temperature in Kingsport and subtract ten degrees. I Googled. The temperature in Kingsport was thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature here was definitely colder than yesterday morning's ten degrees, too. The cats zipped in and out of the sand pit in under three minutes, and did their cleaning-up bit indoors.
The secret of staying warm on a screen porch, not an enclosed room, with just a little hot-air fan in this kind of weather is that when my typing fingers get cold I put the laptop on my knees, on top of the blanket, and curl up right beside the hot-air fan. The cats are sitting on my feet, too, at the time of typing.
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