Animals
The British nanny state contemplates banning 67 dog breeds and, to keep you from feeling a need to click on any clickbait links that don't tell you up front which breeds they mean, here's the list:
Affenpinscher
American Cocker Spaniel
Australian Cattle Dog
Australian Shepherd
Basset
Basset Bleu
Basset Fauve
Beagle
Beauceron
Bergamasco
Bloodhound
Border Collie
Boston Terrier
Boxer
Bracco
Brittany
Brussels Griffon
Bull Mastiff
Bulldog
Cairn Terrier
Cardigan Welsh Corgi
Cavalier King Charles Spaniel
Cesky Terrier
Chihuahua
Chowchow
Clumber Spaniel
Dachshund
Dandie Terrier
Dogue de Bordeaux
French Bulldog
Glen of Imaal Terrier
Grand Basset
Great Dane
Japanese Chin
King Charles Spaniel
Lancashire Heeler
Lhasa Apso
Mastiff
Mudi
Neapolitan Mastiff
Newfoundland
Norfolk Terrier
Norwich Terrier
Old English Sheepdog
Pekingese
Pembroke Welsh Corgi
Petit Basset
Polish Lowland
Pug
Pyr Mastiff
Pyr Shep
Rough Collie
Schipperke
Scottish Terrier
Sealyham Terrier
Shar Pei
Shetland Sheepdog
Shih Tzu
Skye Terrier
Smooth Collie
Spanish Water Dog
St Bernard
Staffordshire Terrier
Sussex Spaniel
Swedish Valhund
Tibetan Mastiff
West Highland White Terrier
They claim that it's because these breeds' genotype can involve dysfunctional genes, or genes for dysfunctional traits. Reality, I suspect, is pure control freaking. Each of these dog breeds has typical health problems, but most of the individual dogs don't have the problems. Or they're not serious--the small and short-legged breeds are automatically considered dysfunctional just because they're small, low-slung dogs, which was a survival trait for cow-herding dogs and is still one for dogs kept in urban apartments.
Which is the point. The idea of herding people into apartments where they pay rent forever is to break up the whole system of owning and passing on homes, land, farms...and family ties. Including ties to animals. Never forget Wayne LaPierre's infamous assertion that in the future, when "we" as a species (a "we" that excluded himself) are all herded into slums, "we" can just redirect our urge to bond toward the cockroaches we'll all be living with. (Cockroaches are thigmotactic; although they run away from lights and people, once caught they like being held. And they're trainable; they could learn to hide from light in people's clothing.) Think of that as you make the mere suspicion of being soft on socialism a career ender for any politician.
How is this different from my saying that nobody should breed Manx or Rex cats? Saying people shouldn't do something is one thing; calling on government to ban it, which would probably involve mass killing or at least mass neutering of pets, is a very different thing.
Additionally, the alleged dysfunctionality of these dog breeds does not compare with the dysfunctionality of Manx and Rex cats. Short-legged dogs are vulnerable to a lot of things, long-haired dogs are vulnerable to eye problems, and floppy-eared dogs like beagles are vulnerable to ear infections if and when people don't look after them properly. With the right human companions they're just fine! Yes, collies and poodles need a lot of grooming, and small short-legged dogs need to be close to their humans whenever they're outdoors--and the right humans for them enjoy doing it.
Books
When Jeanie at themarmeladegypsy.blogspot.com reviewed a novel inspired by the life of Margaret Fishback, and she mistyped the real writer's name as Fishbeck, I confused Fishback (who wrote lots of advertisements, several books of poems, and some children's books and the sort of guides to etiquette that amounted to advertisements) with a different author. Margaret Lee Runbeck was a contemporary of Margaret Fishback. Runbeck wrote more books, and she was the one who wrote mom-com magazine articles that grew into several books about a daughter anonymized as "Our Miss Boo."
The Miss Boo story that was reprinted in junior high school literature books, which my parents liked to offer to me as storybooks when I was in primary school, was about Miss Boo's love of what was then a new fad food: peanut butter sandwiches.
DEI Must Die
It's not altogether bad that employees were asked if they had friends in different demographic groups, including "gay"...but to what extent did the time spent on that sort of chitchat take away from their ability to respond to the Big Freeze?
Religious Issues: From Sabbath to Sunday
For some people, the decision to observe the biblical Sabbath from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday is an affirmation of religious liberty, a statement that "we ought to obey God rather than man." But it's possible to read the change, which occurred long after Christ's time, from mostly Jewish-born Christians observing the Sabbath as their day for rest and worship, to the Roman Emperor decreeing that they so observe Sunday, as something other than a statement of arrogance and egotism. (The Roman solar cult really worshipped the Emperor.) It's possible to read it as a shrewd political move.
Religious Issues: How Groups Acquire Image Problems
Cat Stevens thinks it takes a "monstrous propaganda machine" to turn people against Islam. Meowreally? You don't think little things like ricin gas in the London Tubes and THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 have been factors? You don't think the basic tendency for people to dislike a "fellow who came in to sojourn, and now wants to rule over us" may have something to do with anti-Islamic feeling in the US and UK right now?
Program for Muslims who don't want to find people turned against them when they move to English-speaking, historically Christian countries:
0100 Accept that you are and must remain a minority--that if you become even a large minority you risk expulsion. The more successfully you proselytize, the fewer of your compatriots will be allowed to move here.
0150 Accept that our culture is Christian. Make NO attempt to change that.
0200 Accept that we no longer live in a world where God has made souls of equal value, but humans have deemed male bodies to be more valuable than female. Accept that the majority of jobs that are still done by humans today are jobs for which women are better suited than men. Accept that the biological reality, unenlightened by Christian, Jewish, or Muslim religious teachings, is that male humans have become as biologically disposable as most other male lifeforms are. Spend time in basic training courses learning to defer to any female you may meet on any point, to lower your eyes so that you don't know what non-Muslim women are wearing on the street, and to take orders from female superordinates with good grace. Affirm that no man who has touched any female without her full consent has any business being alive.
0250 Affirm that you understand that eye contact works differently here than it does where you came from. Specifically, some parents work hard to teach their children to stare into the eyes of people of the same sex who may be annoyed by them and people of the opposite sex who might feel attracted to them, even though it's probably true that this behavior is unnatural and confusing. If necessary, take a course in breaking eye contact that feels inappropriate to you by looking at your shoes, without blaming or reacting to the local person in any way.
0260 When hugged or kissed by same-sex friends most of us may think that you're overexcitable or that your inferior education never taught you that that behavior spreads diseases, rather than reacting violently, but accept that you're not supposed to hug or kiss same-sex friends.
0300 Sign a statement affirming that, if you object to any behavior that our culture accepts and yours didn't, your way to express your feelings will always be to go home.
0400 Accept that sharia law is not the law of the land where you are sojourning and never will be. If not satisfied with the way our law punishes crimes, go home.
0500 Use your opportunity to study what our laws actually say, and what the Bible actually says, so that you know your rights and can lawfully claim what's due to you. Accepting that you're in a minority in no way implies encouraging bigotry, which does our native-born bigots even more harm than it does you.
0600 Accept that, if you bring children here or stay here long enough to have children, those children will have a legal right to flout your cultural and religious rules. Try to surround yourself with people of different generations who can encourage your children to respect those rules. Jews and Christians don't have to fast for Ramadan or wear tunics outside our belts, much less study Arabic and the Quran, but many, perhaps most, of us do believe that it's honorable for children (even adult children) to follow their parents' rules while living in their parents' houses. Some of us will say to our children, "If your school friends are fasting, don't eat in their faces."
0700 If you come here as a bachelor and want to be married, marry someone from your own country. Although we do, in practice, have "temporary marriage," we don't have a tradition that accepts and respects it. We require ourselves to pay lip service to the ideal of marriage for life; we associate marriage with love rather than obligations. There are American women who could probably be satisfied with a "temporary marriage" to a guest worker if our culture honestly said to them, "Look, you're not a virgin, you're not planning to give this man sons and bring them up as Muslims--you don't want a permanent marriage to this temporary resident. You want to play house with a cute boy for two to five years. Just don't complain when it ends." But no. When you leave our cultural perception is going to be that you USED and DUMPED and BETRAYED a woman who, we want to believe, wanted you to be part of an American or British Christian marriage for life. Why go there? Marry a nice hometown woman for life.
0800 There are things you have to teach us, by setting a good example. Show us what loyalty, honor, hospitality, generosity, friendship, and even relative freedom from color prejudice look like.
0900 It IS One God. There is only One God. To whatever extent people perceive a difference, they perceive human misunderstanding. Wa Salaam Alaikum.
Women's Issues
Tacky human beings take credit for an idea when it seems to be working and blame other people for it when they have to deal with unpleasant consequences. Trump reassigned Secretary Noem because Trump is a tacky human being. The alarming thing is Trump fans' willingness to play along with this tacky game. How else is it possible to account for anyone calling this woman ugly?
And why, after all these years, should it have mattered if she'd been uglier than a warthog?
(Photo by Alex Brandon.)
"Do they mean that she did ugly things?" The confrontational quality of last winter's INS raids was ugly all right, but Trump took credit (in his mind it was credit!) for that and it does seem more Trump's kind of thing than any woman's. Nobody's claiming to have any actual "dirt" on Noem. If they're saying she did ugly things, they're passing judgment on her speeches or gossipping about her teamwork with another federal employee (the old "If a woman and a man support each other on the job, they're undoubtedly a couple" line of slander).
To me Secretary Noem looks as if she's trying a little too hard to copy more of Melania Trump's styles than she can copy effectively, but she's certainly not ugly. At the very worst she might be called a fashion victim.
Writing Life
Shared by Mona Andrei. Google says this one is actually for sale on Zazzle, and so are several other "Writers' Clocks" with more helpful timetables. Buy the one that features "Drink heavily" (which I don't do) at
Buy one I consider more relevant, although it doesn't mention things like "Read Pbird's blog so I can exercise to her favorite songs," "Network," "Go into town to use phone to negotiate ways to schedule bill payments, fending off poorer people begging for help to pay their bills approximately every third of a mile," "Try to think of different ways to cook beans that don't cost more money," or "Generate Monthly Fluffball," which might be why this month's Fluffball was so late, at
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