Happy birthday to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. I plan to take some time today to reflect on that memory. I'd like to see it reconstituted in living people. We need a little "malice toward none, and charity toward all."
Yesterday was a weird weather day. We and places to our south are basking in the February Thaw, while places just a little further north got the another big freeze. Some places are even colder than they were last week. The weather guessers who thought we'd have our Thaw this week also thought we were due for another Big Freeze next week, so don't resent us too much, please, if you're sitting in the Adirondacks where it was still 25 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, this morning.
The loudest complaints about last week's weather have come from inanimate objects: The desktop computer's monitor developed an annoying warm-up tic that makes it hard to use for the first minute or two after it awakens from hibernation mode, and the Comfort Zone hot-air fan started balking.
Gardening
How a patch of land where nothing's been planted should look...
Photo by Kim M. Russell, from the beautiful natural garden she's documented keeping at WritingInNorthNorfolk. She posts lovely cat and bird photos from that garden, too.
Michelle Obama, What She Thought She Was Talking About
Poor Mrs. Obama. She's not planning to run for President because she picked the wrong approach to what she wanted to say. Believe it or not, when one of the most overprivileged women in America--both continents--said that "As Black women we're not allowed to express our pain," and the Internet blew up in gales of uncharitable laughter, Mrs. Obama was trying to claim some sort of solidarity with ordinary Black American women.
* Black American women are between three and four times more likely to die in childbirth than White women:
* And three times more likely to die from complications of pregnancy:
* While Black women have felt free, and sometimes encouraged, to whine "They hired him instead of me because he's a White man and if his test scores were 10% higher than mine that's probably just because he's a White man, too," and similar annoying lines, they have felt somewhat awkward talking publicly about gross-out disease conditions like endometriosis. White women are more likely to develop that disease; Black women are more likely to get a misdiagnosis when they do develop it.
* Similarly, though less likely to have any kind of cancer, Black women are far more likely than White women are to die from some kinds of cancer. Black women are 85% more likely than White women are to die from, specifically, cancer of the uterus.
* Black Americans generally, male or female, are more likely to have cardiovascular disease than White Americans are. It's been estimated that over half of all Black women over age 20 have cardiovascular disease at some stage.
Statistically, Black women outlive their men, just as White women do, but on average White people of both sexes live longer. And all poor Mrs. Obama was trying to get at was that some Black women have noticed these facts and are trying to find out why.
Well, if that's the best she can do at introducing a topic to which few people can object, we know we don't ever want her as President. And maybe, like Mrs. Dole before her, she knows enough about the President's job to try every way she knows to avoid ever getting it.
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