Animals
So here, for good measure, are some more chickens. I don't know that these hens are supposed to bring you good luck, but either they've been Photoshopped or they are enjoying some good luck for themselves: The fox that was able to get into their coop was cold, not hungry.
Shared by Joe Jackson. He doesn't say whose chickens they are, and Google can't find them at any online news site.
Climate Foolishness
Trump and friends take aim at all "climate change"-related regulations. Huzza!
Climate change is a debated possibility, not a proven fact. Laws should be based in proven facts. Laws attempting to prevent "climate change" are bids for global tyranny, and should be demolished.
That does not mean we don't need regulations about things that do, in proven fact, adversely affect the climate or other environmental conditions where they take place. We need a ban on spraying any volatile chemicals into the air outdoors. We need bans on fracking, on nuclear power plants, and on chopping down trees to feed oversized biomass burners. Some cities need to regulate population density, mandate green space, and encourage walking. But we don't need to indulge envious foreigners' delusions that they can be allowed to dictate how we live.
Mormons
I intentionally made an experiment on X this morning. Someone had shared, at another site, a post in which someone calling perself "Latter-Day Laura" included a video in which a skinny blonde, who had supposedly said she didn't want children, cuddled a baby, burst into tears, and said "I'd like to have eight." It may have happened, unstaged; there are young women who want children but think they have to sell this idea to unwilling young men, stealthily, by lying about what they want. (Ladies, if you have to tell lies to get a man's attention, you'd do better not to bother with him. Wait for the next one.) Lots of people had replied. I threw out a few simple, commonsense statements about the reality of parenthood in a crowded world:
* It won't actually work to keep Social Security running on its original unsustainable terms, because there won't be jobs for the surplus babies.
* It's not humane to try to rear children in an apartment block. If you can't afford a house with a room and a garden for each child, you can't afford children.
* Abortion is still too hazardous to a woman's health to qualify as birth control. Other methods are vastly more enjoyable and more effective...and the ones that work best don't require anyone to buy any product, at all.
* Babies are adorable...when they're happy and healthy. In order to have happy, healthy babies in our crowded world, people need to choose to produce one or none. There is no shortage of homeless babies for those who want more.
* However, many people, perhaps most people in today's environment, do not want any babies. We like being baby-free. And the species benefits from our being baby-free, because human babies need tertiary care providers (aunts, uncles, and grandparents) in addition to their primary parents (mothers) and secondary parents (fathers).
Considering that "Latter-Day Laura" had identified with a Christian group, I didn't bother trying to guess which respondents cared about the fact that Christianity was founded by celibate, baby-free people. Marriage was a concession made to young, hormone-ridden Christians' feelings. The ideal was to be able to overcome sexual temptations, as Jesus did. Christians have idealized lifelong, perfect, "innocent" (asexual) virginity in ways that were unfair to normal young people, but there's never been anything Christian about various secular governments' campaigns to increase the birth rate after plagues or wars.
I was surprised by the bizarre and backward ideas people brought into that "thread." Not Christian ideas by any stretch. At least one respondent seemed to think that people need children to make sacrifices to get us into a desirable afterlife. Several Xers identifying as men wanted to believe that "all women" wanted children, that those who don't had been brainwashed, and that exposure to infants would produce an instant "factory reset." Most replies to the comments I posted were hostile. Quite a lot of Latter-Day Laura's Xeeps seemed to belong to some weird sex cult, not a religion founded by Jesus, with a doctrine that it's everyone's duty to procreate. Tellingly, when reminded that it's not everyone's desire to procreate, this group fell back on "Oh how selfish."
I happen to believe that all rightminded people do instinctively love and nurture babies--albeit often, especially at the apartment-dwelling stage of life, we're glad to hand them back to their parents after a few minutes or hours of nurturing. But, do women want to drop out of school, quit our jobs, and become full-time brood cows for life, because we've snuggled a baby? Here and there a woman may feel moved, by a little baby-cuddling, to confide to a friend that when she's sure she's found her beshert she would like to have a baby. ("Eight" is obviously the self-identification of a girl who's been encouraged to vent feelings without thinking through what she is saying.) But even in the 1980s, when the world was less crowded than it is now, a church college was known to be an easy place to find baby-sitters. Nice, Christian young ladies, recommended by their teachers. And what effect did baby-sitting have on us? The most reliable immediate effect was shopping. And after shopping? "I was sitting with Joe's and Jane's baby. I can see why they look so old and tired."
One might as easily claim that exposure to infants makes young men see that their desires to play games and watch television were only pop culture's "brainwashing," and they really want to work overtime on jobs they hate and come home to rinse out diapers in the toilet. Sure they do!
The things the "pro-motherhood," actually anti-woman, Xers posted in that thread really made me reconsider Mormons. Are they Christians, whose Example for life was celibate--or are they some sort of creepy sex cult where, as someone actually posted, the baby-free have no value to God or humankind?
At the very least I think "conservative," or at least non-left-wing, Christians need a campaign affirming the high value we place on women "as mothers AND AS SO MUCH MORE." Reminding women that a responsible adult's time in the nursery lasts no more than ten years and then, unless they are professional baby-sitters, women go back into adult society and do the more cerebral kind of jobs they are naturally suited to do better than men, who excel at jobs that involve upper body strength.
And, unless and until Mormons are positively encouraging women to make better contributions to the world than aggravating our existing overpopulation problems, we all need to make sure that Mormons are not part of our government or our educational system, or considered for any kind of position where they might influence the young.
We need to get realistic. In a world where people who want to work can't get jobs and people who have jobs can't afford enough land to feed themselves, it's people who have multiple babies who are obviously selfish. And lust-ridden. And unimaginative.
Once upon a time people could be proud of having fifteen children...because so many people died so young that there was real danger of families and towns dying out. And in America, the land of new-found wealth, as in Russia, the breadbasket of Europe in those days, a few people did have fifteen children or more. And in both countries those hordes of children were often tall, even gigantic by most European standards, the males often all of six feet tall. And the babies died in infancy from unknown causes, and the children died in their school years and teen years. In a family who were unusually lucky ten of those fifteen children might live long enough to be allowed to vote. In a more ordinary family, seven might. And funerals were the most common kind of social event people who weren't wealthy ever attended. And plagues raged. When people went into town and socialized, with trepidation, keeping gloves on their hands and maintaining a healthy distance, they asked about everyone whose names they could remember, not in order to gossip about what people were known or suspected to be doing, but in order to know which of their friends--even which teenagers' friends--had died since the last visit.
A cult of "We're all about having babies, lots of babies" could very easily set American society back to that level, if we let it. A good way not to let it would be a general policy whereby "That man let his wife get pregnant--twice!" is a guarantee that the only job that man gets will be with an overnight cleaning service.
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