Whoa Nelly! Seventy thousand page views, Google says we got on Tuesday. And a good two-thirds of them appeared to be in the United States, too; the rest scattered around the world in a reasonable way, with about as many views from Russia as we got on an average day when Google was publishing this web site in Russian. Maybe they've started again. I don't want to know. I know robot translation made the French and Spanish editions of my blog look very strange. Maybe that's the attraction for our Russian readers. Maybe the Russian edition is a real laugh riot.
Some of the extra readers have to be hackers and spammers.
Some of them are here because Tuesday's post was furiously, and intentionally, controversial. Yes, I know the Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate are going to hate me. They already do. I don't care how they feel. Facts first. I want all of The Nephews to have long healthy lives.
Happily, several views, according to Google, "referred from" sites where I posted comments using links back to this site, and are welcome as the flowers. Most of those comments were not terribly controversial.
I did reminisce a bit, at one site, about the homelessness crisis in Washington, DC, and the peculiar fact that doing what seemed to solve the problem there actually seemed to double the problem within the years. It should have been more easily predicted. Mitch Snyder, speaking on behalf of a homeless population most of whose worst problem really was that their rent had just been raised beyond their salaries, said that the city needed to give everyone a place to stay. Mayor Marion Barry, a brilliant man in his way, agreed to give every homeless Washingtonian a decent place to stay, often a motel suite with a kitchenette for those living with children. It really worked, for a while. Then word got about.
My adoptive brother, who was homeless for a year or so after a disabling accident, was trying to avoid his old roommate from the shelter where they'd stayed. Being small and young, they'd watched out for each other, but the roommate hadn't dropped out of university. He identified as a Communist--the Cold War was still on. He wanted to be a full-time career homeless bum, and had come all the way from San Francisco to take advantage of Washington's wonderful new policy of housing the homeless.
Quite a few people had come to Washington for that reason. Every homeless Washingtonian now had a nice place to stay, and the streets were fuller than ever of more conspicuous and objectionable homeless people. Your typical homeless Washingtonian was embarrassed not to have a home and tried to keep out of everyone's way after work. The new homeless population would throw their sleeping bags right in front of a major tourist attraction, beg for spare change when our homeless population were on their jobs or looking for their next jobs...
Some of them were even Washingtonians; the signs that advertised them as "Homeless & Hungry" were outright lies. I found one begging on the street in Georgetown, during the month when I had, at the very last minute, found a room for rent that I could afford in the neighborhood I wanted. "You can follow me home if you want to," I said. "The landlady won't allow men inside the house, but I can bring a meal out on the porch. We can talk to some people about a place to stay tonight."
"Actually I'm not hungry. Do I look hungry?" he said. (He was not one of the obese people you see everywhere now, but he would have looked better after losing ten or twenty pounds.) "Actually I have a place to stay, though it's not really a home. My wife's in it. She nags. I'm working on a divorce. Actually I just panhandle for fun, seeing how much money I can make this way. Actually I'm going to spend it on beer. I probably will go back to the old bleep's house tonight, once I'm too drunk to care what she says."
If either Snyder or Barry was surprised by this kind of thing, they shouldn't have been. I wasn't.
Animals
Having said that Kristi Noem doesn't look ugly, I've been reminded of the scandalette created when she chose to publish, in a memoir, the story of her having SHOT a PUPPY. As usual the attackers left out key elements of the story. The puppy called Cricket had been rejected by other people who thought it was vicious; it had attacked humans, though not yet seriously harmed anyone; when it "ruined the hunt" when she was trying to teach it to hunt wild fowl, it became frustrated and started killing a nearby family's chickens. Noem shot the dog on the spot because that is what responsible dog owners do if their dog has attacked a person or a domestic animal, and the family are watching. Yes, the dog might be put in a shelter and placed in some other family, though it sounds as if another family would have been more disappointed--and endangered--than Noem's were. But if your dog has killed someone's chickens and the person is watching, first you kill the dog, then you pay for the chickens. Those chickens might have been pets, too. Their humans might want to watch that dog die. Or they might stop you, in which case you can put the dog in a shelter with a clear conscience--if the shelter will have it, which the shelter probably won't. Often taking an animal who behaves badly to a shelter is just adding the price of gas to the price of a bullet.
Should it have occurred to Noem that puppies, like small children, tend to "ruin" things they're allowed to join, the very first time, and Cricket might have learned better in a training situation than on a hunt with a lot of unfamiliar humans and older dogs? Yes. Retrievers have a natural talent for retrieving, pointers have a natural talent for pointing, hounds have a natural talent for hounding, but they need some guidance to learn to do those things well. But stupid puppy mistakes are one thing, and biting people and killing chickens is another thing.
Is it more humane to have an animal euthanized by injection than to shoot it? Depends on the skills of the person shooting. I've seen injections fail to kill an animal right away, too.
I hear the story more as a tragedy than as an outrage. I will, however, allow that it's an ugly story. There are animals even animal lovers can't love.
Another sad and ugly story is that this story was part of what got Noem the job that made her famous. We as a nation still think that the people who do responsible jobs need to be able to kill. A friend once told me, "I wouldn't vote for you for President. The President may need to be tough and mean. You're too tender-hearted. I'd vote for my ex-wife for President. I'd vote for Hillary Clinton." We did re-elect a President who cried in public, in a dignified and manly way, when a young civilian was killed. We probably wouldn't elect one who showed any hesitation or remorse about killing, e.g., Khamenei, who might not have been a threat to us, but then again he might...
Christians believe that one day we may live in a better world where sweet, tender-hearted, gentle souls can be our leaders. Nobody believes that that day has come. If Noem had gone all Nice Girl, "Oh the poor baby dog just didn't know what to do," etc., etc., some people who've never lived with chickens might liiike her more...but she wouldn't have been elected Governor, nor appointed head of Homeland Security. She would have convinced everybody that she was an excellent choice for a pink-collar job, and been an office manager or junior partner today.
(Do I always endorse every controversial thing women do? By no means. But when women are being bashed and trashed in the media I do think long and hard about whether they're being judged by the sort of standards I think ought to apply to me or to any of The Nephews who happens to be a niece. If a woman did in fact drop a bomb on a primary school, bash away.)
Cybersecurity
For a lot of left-wingers, the issue that matters to most people, be it climate change or cybersecurity or civil rights or whatever else, is secondary to their primary goal of "revolution." I hope Cindy Cohn is not just another one of those. Her organization may be worthwhile.
Social Media
Barkley's Human summarizes why Linked In is such a dead bore.
Google says several people have generated this kind of memes and credits this specific meme to Ulrik Aerenlund on Linked In, with a hint that Linda Adamkovicova may have started the series with a meme where the dog barked at the mail carrier.
Google also classifies my comment on Vince Staten's blog post as a joke. The plagiarism-bot's sense of humor is not quite up to human standards.
Songs, Inane
I like some of Crosby's, Stills', and Nash's songs, but just listen to this one...
and see if you don't start thinking of reprises:
My house
is a very, very, very fine house
with three cats in the yard
(more than David Crosby's got)
and I write better songs than he does, too.
If you don't think so,
whatcha gonna do?
At least that one's not about living off a rich housemate.
Then again, at least Crosby appreciated that the proper place of cats, in any place where anyone would want to live, is in the yard.
Sports
Vince Staten...George Peters of Kingsport, mentioned here, was not a close relative of George Peters of Gate City. The one I knew had a younger brother, not a twin. But although neither "George" nor "Peters" by itself has ever been on a list of the most common names, "George Peters" used to be one of the ten most common combinations of given names and family names in North America.
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