Book Review: The Strong-Willed Child

Title: The Strong-Willed Child

Author: James Dobson

Date: 1978

Publisher: Tyndale

ISBN: 0-8423-6661-X

Length: 240 pages

Quote: “Most parents have at least one such youngster who seems to be born with a clear idea of how he wants the world to be operated.”

It’s James Dobson, so you know what to expect, right? Religious Right? Right! Dobson may be remembered as an advocate of physical correction for children.

I personally believe that parents have a right to use reasonable physical correction on children. I was spanked as a child, by other older people as well as my own parents, and I don't think it did me a bit of harm. In fact one of the more loving things my father ever did for me, as a child, was to knock me down flat...before I could step on a venomous snake. I'd hope I'd be able to do that for a child today. However, apart from a few obvious correctives like "Don't step on that snake" or "Don't play with matches" or "You're not allowed to hit other people," I don't remember spanking doing me any good, either. It didn't leave physical or psychic scars but it completely failed to teach me what adults wanted me to do instead of whatever I'd been doing. Before trying to justify slapping a little hand, adults need to consider what we want the child to learn. If it's "Keep the house clean," then instead of slapping the child who carelessly spills food on the floor, it makes more sense to direct the child to clean up the mess. Venting emotions at children may or may not scare them; it does distract them from absorbing information. It teaches them "Teacher doesn't like me" instead of "Kicking the back of the seat ahead of me is rude."

If you have a reasonable level of tolerance for Dobson’s school of thought, there’s still room for doubt about how useful a book about rearing children can be. Dobson can’t even claim extensive firsthand experience with being the parent of a strong-willed child; according to him, the member of his household who best exemplified this trait was a dog. Dobson is an expert on applying Bible teachings to family matters, but in this book he is admittedly out of his field, and it shows. Strong-willed children can be introverts or extroverts and this is one case where the distinction is crucial: the way adults relate to an introvert child’s will needs to be almost opposite from the way they relate to an extrovert child’s will. Dobson’s approach is geared only toward extroverts.

Dobson’s dog was never very well trained, but it did eventually learn to obey “a few simple commands.” One day, after years of obeying “Go to your bed,” the dog defied Dobson and wanted to spend the night on the fluffy toilet lid cover near the heater. It growled, snapped, tried to bite. “That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast” before Dobson moved the dog into its bed. The next night, when told “Go to your bed,” the dog went. Dobson reports that during the next four years it didn’t challenge Dobson again.

Strong-willed children, Dobson is saying, are like his little “alpha dog.” They challenge adults. A young father whose idea of quality time with his child was to take a three-year-old to a basketball game told the kid, “don’t go past this line.” “He had no sooner returned to his seat than the toddler scurried in the direction of the forbidden territory...and deliberately placed one foot over the line.”

The archetypal, or Archie-Bunker-typal, right-wingers in Dobson’s intended audience clearly believed that parents and others who work with children need to be “tough enough to make [the children] obey.” Those who believe that humans should “obey” other humans only in the sense of respecting others’ rights and boundaries, that the way to teach children math or manners or morals is to call their attention to our examples when necessary, may not like this book.

The strong-willed or Type A personality trait is sometimes considered basically an extrovert trait—the only functional personality trait that is correlated with extroversion. That may account for Dobson’s neglect of introvert children. However, the trait is independent of extroversion. In fact Type A’s who don’t show the more fully developed neurological “wiring” of true introverts still tend to be high-functioning extroverts, who “like to get things done, whether with others or alone,” and while they like to take control of their environment they don’t compulsively clamor for control of other people’s attention. To assume that “the strong-willed child” is an extrovert is probably a mistake. 

Introverts are not shy so much as inner-directed; if what they want to do can be better done with a group, they can organize and lead the group without showing any interest whatsoever in maintaining “social leadership” as a form of ongoing control of other people. The “natural leader” of one activity may, in the absence of personal hostility, prefer to let someone else be the “natural leader” of another activity. It’s possible for Type A’s who identify as extroverts to be survivors of twentieth century America’s cultural war on introversion, during which we were told things like “You aren’t, or don’t want to be, an introvert—you’re not shy, you’re attractive, persuasive, a natural leader when you choose to be...” Neurological tests might quantify how many Americans who consider themselves to be extroverts are, in fact, no such thing. It would be interesting to know the results of neurological studies on many celebrity politicians, movie stars, athletes, and business leaders. Successful musicians are typically introverts; I suspect successful people in other fields may be strong-willed introverts too.

Little introverts may or may not be particularly strong-willed, but when they are, it’s unlikely that even the human version of a “vicious fight” will do them much good. Unlike dogs, children grow bigger and stronger, and see that adults grow less strong, every year. A strong-willed introvert child who is subdued for the moment by forcible correction will eventually hit back. On the other hand introverts have that inner sense of “rightness” that, if the child is not battered, will naturally teach the child that hitting other people is as wrong as singing off key, coloring outside the lines, or leaving a mess on the floor. Parents can recruit the strong will of an introvert child. This is the child who may need occasional correction, but generally behaves reasonably. Misbehavior is usually best corrected by addressing the reason for it. Attempts to “break” a strong-willed introvert child can be physically dangerous to the adult, or to a younger or slower-witted child on whom a child like Charles Schultz’s “Lucy” may dump emotions. This child must be reasoned with.

Practical rewards and punishments for these two types of children are almost mirror images. Almost all children perceive candy as a reward and beating as a punishment, but obviously neither candy nor beating can be used every day. What introverts want in social relationships is the kind of respect that backs off and allows them to do things by themselves; they don’t particularly want attention, and may perceive group attention as a punishment. What extroverts want is control of as many people’s attention as possible; they like to be liked or respected, but they’d rather start a fight and lose it than be left to do something by themselves. Parents can use their attention to reward and punish specific behavior. Introvert children respond well to directives like “When you’ve accomplished X, you earn points toward (money, computer time, etc.).” Extrovert children may need directives like “When you’ve been completely quiet for one hour, then I’ll listen to you for five minutes.”

Confusion is understandable since strong-willed Type A’s are the ones who invented the idea of “ambiverts.” Either they have introverts’ neurological assets or they don’t. Mostly they don't but, given adequate motivation, they can be comfortable either working alone or organizing groups of people to focus on the tasks of their choice. Usually they’re intelligent enough to see the advantages of working well with others, so after the toddler tantrum stage they develop good, often charming, social manners. Their strong personalities can easily seem to have both introvert and extrovert “personality strength.” They tend to like this idea; they like to think they’re in full control of their own personalities. However, for purposes of behavior modification, it will help adults to know which a child really is.

While Dobson is probably right about it being good for young children to know that their parents’ wills are even stronger than theirs, the image of a “vicious fight” may still be inappropriate. Type A’s can perceive their ability to laugh off punishments as desirable enough that they actively invite punishments. While some Type A’s internalize the idea of not only strict but harsh physical discipline, and grow up to be child abusers, others convince themselves that they’ve been martyrs for their “cause” of sloppiness, irreverence, profanity, sexual self-indulgence, or disrespect of their elders. The prudent adult will use insight into their temperament to reinforce desirable behavior with positive rewards. Type A’s respect a firm consistent stand longer than they do a “vicious fight.”

By overlooking neurological differences, Dobson produced yet another twentieth century book that may be useful to parents of extroverts, but drifts in and out of touch with reality as introverts know it. By 1978 the world didn’t need any more of those.

Book Review: Sweet Revenge

Title: Sweet Revenge

Author: Regina Barreca

Date: 1995 (hardcover), 1997 (paperback)

Publisher: Crown (1995), Berkley (1997)

ISBN: 0-425-15766-0 (1997)

Length: 292 pages

Quote: “A little revenge, we should remember, goes a long way.”

Regina Barreca painted herself into an unusual corner before writing this book. She belongs to the “Women Are ‘Relational,’ Therefore Nicer” school of feminism. Hence the selfconscious tightrope-walking quality of Barreca’s connective writing in this book. Revenge isn’t Nice, she seems to be saying, and I have to pay lip service to Niceness but...

It’s easier to enjoy this book if you abandon the ideal of Niceness and reclaim a belief in Justice,. Then you can acknowledge that personal revenge, although obviously less desirable than formal justice, is what’s supposed to happen if formal justice fails. Forgiveness is a beautiful thing. Forgiveness begins with repentance.

If you have trespassed against somebody and not repented, confessed, and made some effort to compensate for what you did, you can’t be forgiven. Whatever the offended person does will qualify as revenge. The person might choose to ignore you; in that case you’d never know how long it would last, and you’d have to spend the rest of your life looking out behind you. The person might choose to be kind to you; in that case you’d have to spend the rest of your lifer knowing yourself to have been morally inferior to him/her. I recently read a book in which a minister described how he was unable to collect payment on a loan for years, until he wrote to the borrower that he had decided to repay the debt to himself in an attempt to forgive the borrower’s trespass just as God had forgiven him; the borrower made several efforts to repay the loan, but the minister refused to take the money...and he seemed to think that he wasn’t exacting revenge.,

Revenge, we see, is not a social problem but a fact of life. Trespassing in the first place is the problem of concern to society. And impenitence.

But why argue about the philosophy of revenge? What readers want to know, before deciding to read 292 pages on the subject, is whether the revenge stories in this book are good ones. Yes, there are several previously unpublished stories of creative, proportionate, even legal revenge.

Also a few stories of revenge that was disproportionate and unethical. A vindictive younger sibling sneaks into a boy’s room and turns all his pet turtles over on their backs. For me this act is out of bounds, because who knows how much or how long those inoffensive turtles will have to suffer? Now, if the guy had been a few years older, and the younger sibling had managed to turn his car upside down...

I’ll leave readers to pass their own judgments on the ethics of accidentally-on-purpose burning (a) the offender’s food or (b) the offender’s favorite record. I will offer this subjective judgment: when dissatisfied employees walk out and start a competing business that submarines their former employer’s business, I think that’s absolutely splendid.

Sweet Revenge is recommended to anyone sane enough to recognize that the Poe character in “The Cask of Amontillado,” whose revenge for a minor offense is to bury a trusting friend alive, is pure fiction.

Book Review: Stop Living on Autopilot

Title: Stop Living on Autopilot

Author: Waleska Curvelo

Quote: "Why does it feel like no matter how hard I work, I can't make progress toward what I really want?"

In the 1980s the authors of books like this one had degrees in psychology, the books were called self-help books, and their content usually contained a lot of theoretical blather about the emotional roots of all of our problems. Some things have improved since then. The authors are now called life coaches and the content of the books is now frankly just inspirational pep talks. You can do whatever you want to do! If you make the right choices! What choices that are, only you can say! If you're wrong about the steps to take to get what you want, it's not my fault! 

I've certainly read self-help books that were worse than this one. Curvelo at least writes good clear English, instead of inventing a technical-sounding jargon all her own, as some of the psychological self-help guides used to do.

Better? What is better, in the context of self-help books? What is worse? Because these books try to be so open-ended and valuable to everybody, any of them might deserve credit for encouraging someone to run with a brilliant idea, or blame for encouraging someone to cling to a terrible idea. 

For better or worse, both when I've been pointed out as an example of success and when I'm probably being pointed out as an example of failure...the "just set goals and stick to them" approach to life has never really worked for me. The Bible advises us not to attach ourselves to "Tomorrow we shall go to a certain city, and stay there for so long, and do such and so," but to allow for the vicissitudes life tends to have: "If God wills we shall go to a certain city..." We can buy tickets with a certain destination on them, but if a snowstorm blows up in the way, we may be spending the night somewhere other than that destination. I suspect God has a big laugh at the expense of the very "goal-oriented" Type A who forms attachments to goals and steps. 

I even remember, in my early twenties, a few experiments with thinking the "goal-oriented" way. "I currently have this job, where I'm making this amount of money and can afford to use this much to pay off my college loan debt. I've applied for this other job, where I'll be making this amount of money, but I'll have these expenses, but anyway I should be able to set aside this much to pay off my college loan debt." I may still have the old notebook where I wrote that kind of thing down. So what happened next? In that particular case, I thought I had recovered from "chronic mononucleosis"; I was wrong. The disease flared up. I lost the job I had and someone else was hired for the other one. My college loan debt was eventually paid off, but not that year and not that way.

I do believe it's a good idea to have some idea where we would like to go in life, but it's also a good idea to notice how much our goals and steps have in common with sand castles on the beach.

You may have better luck than I had at "goal-orienting" Say you want a college degree. That's a nice goal that many people find achievable, although I didn't happen to be one of them. You want a college degree, so you enroll in a college, confer with an adviser, plan the courses you need to take, register for the courses, do the course work while setting aside enough of your paycheck to pay for them, or pay as much as you can of the cost of them...This feels good to the orderly and logical part of your brain, it's almost certain to be useful at some time in your life, and actually the odds are that you'll get the degree for which you're studying. Even in the 1980s most people didn't get "chronic mononucleosis," nor, when most people go back for a second try at a degree they didn't finish in their teens, do they find both of their parents in separate hospitals within the year. Most people who register for college courses and do the assignments will, in a few years, have a college degree. It's a good credential to have and represents valuable learning experiences...whether or not you ever work for even one year in the job that college degree was meant to prepare you for...

When I was growing up, detachment from career goals, specifically, was considered a wonderful thing for girls to have. Because of course everyone knew that most girls who prepared for jobs in teaching or bookkeeping or nursing or whatever were really going to get even better opportunities...what a wonderful surprise! how special!--to get married and have babies. And some of us are still today in denial about how much harm the idea of everyone having multiple babies has done to this world. 

But does that mean that it's good to plan our lives in any expectation that life is ever going to be orderly and logical? Meh. It never hurts to plan for the possibility that the chaos in our lives will subside enough for some steps we might take toward goals to lead us in the direction of those goals, but I think most authors of self-help books could be more realistic about the fact that life is chaotic. 

Curvelo does suggest, in a lovely tactful non-evangelical way, that steps toward goals should be congruent with being the kind of person you want to be. If you earn a degree that qualifies you for a job that ceases to exist as of three weeks before you receive your diploma, at least you learned things and you probably met people you appreciate having the chance to know. If, in the name of steps toward the goal, you told lies or cheated people, that will affect your self-image...

I think Curvelo errs on the side of sanctimony in saying that women shouldn't talk about the harmful consequences of a hundred and fifty years of preferential treatment for men. Of course all men are not our enemies. Of course most of us love our husbands and brothers and fathers and sons...though some of us have learned the hard way that men who behave well toward us, because they respect our physical relationships to them or our families' wealth and status or it might even be our characters, don't behave so well toward "outsider" women, or poor women, or younger women who are more easily intimidated. Of course we want, in any case, to help our men do the best they can. I don't think that means pampering their ego defenses. I think men need to face the facts: If you think your teenage daughter is in any danger of being raped, then you know, deep down, that a curfew on men would be a good thing. 

I enjoyed Curvelo's comments on social media, especially the advertising these days, from people whose thinking seems to go "After you used the 'skip' button to tune out my ad once and listen to what you wanted to listen to, I'll then leap in and interrupt what you were listening to, just in case you've changed your mind in the last five minutes!" Yes. Social media had the potential to do advertising much less offensively, more effectively, than television simply by recognizing the different conditions under which people use computers and watch television. Computer users may be bored but we tend to be awake, usually doing some sort of paid work, whereas TV watchers are often using TV as a sort of loud white noise and/or asleep, or trying to sleep. Being noticed as a vague annoyance by someone who's not thinking may sell a few more products than being noticed more consciously as having crafter a clever advertisement. Being noticed as an interruption by people who are working, or taking breaks from work, does not go so well. Youtube and Rumble could have opted to offer ad filtering in such a way that viewers never heard the same advertisement twice in a year, or that advertisements consisted of ten seconds of silence or instrumental music while the product logo or image was on the screen. Instead they've chosen to advertise more annoyingly than commercial television. Yes, we can all reduce the level of annoyance in our lives by reducing the number of videos we watch, or watching only the least popular channels on which Youtube and Rumble don't place advertisements. This will eventually be good for Youtube and Rumble, too. 

I think Curvelo honestly intends to coach readers toward success in life. Life and readers being what they are, sometimes she'll succeed, sometimes not. 

Book Review: Be Intolerant

Title: Be Intolerant

Author: Ryan Dobson

Date: 2003

Publisher: Multnomah Publishers

ISBN: 1-59052-152-8

Length: 108 pages

Quote: “I want to bring you out of the darkness of political correctness into the light, peace, and freedom of the truth.”

Ryan Dobson is not, of course, encouraging bigotry here. He’s saying that when people try to make tolerance the core of their philosophy, they end up becoming nihilists. A line between “All the different things people sincerely believe have some truth, for those people, and deserve some respect” and “All the different things people believe are equally true” tends to fade. People turn into deranged Richard Dawkins sound-alikes furiously arguing that they aren’t really thinking and, furthermore, may not really exist.

If you’d rather approach Dobson’s points from a classical philosophical perspective, of course, check out C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man. If you’d rather be titillated by a hormonal stew of emotion, try Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. If you’re young enough, even at heart, to identify with Dobson’s “generation... being destroyed by manic tolerance,” you may appreciate his short, no-frills plea for standards of merit.

Dobson’s subtitle is ...Because Some Things Are Just Plain Stupid. He identifies five aspects of politically correct stupidity as making up a philosophical “T.U.M.O.R.” excessive Tolerance, obsessive Untraditionalism, falling in love with the Marginalized, worshipping the Outdoors, and excusing Reprobate conduct.

Can we be classically liberal and still eliminate these qualities from our thinking? I say we not only can, but must.

Excessive religious Tolerance means trying to believe that all religions are equally true. Most religions teach that no human mind can grasp all the truth in the universe, and there are times when dialogue with adherents of a different religion can enlighten people about their own overlooked beliefs. Still, how much sense does it make to pretend that the beliefs that have made some people poor, sick, and miserable are equally as valuable as the beliefs that have made others strong, rich, healthy, powerful, and even generous? 

Untraditional ideas, often marketed as someone’s creative take on some obscure foreign tradition, can be a rich source of artistic inspiration. And the ideas have to be pretty bizarre to offend the parents of today’s students, after three generations of infatuation with vestiges of vanishing minority cultures. If you want to study the Yuchi language, or some new language constructed on its remains, that’s fine with me. But if you embrace the ideas that failed those who originally believed them, or claim to, are you even being merely stupid, or are you also being disrespectful of the people whose culture you admire? Using Buddhist calming-and-grounding techniques to cope with mood swings is wonderful; bogging down in the kind of Buddhist passivism that allowed China to be bullied by Japan and India to be tyrannized over by England is, at best, stupid.

Not wanting anyone to be Marginalized is a noble idea and a lovely character trait, but it can be exploited and made functionally stupid. Does being non-racist oblige anyone to pretend that the Obama girls have been more victimized than homeless Anglo-American children are? Does fairness toward people with disabilities mean eliminating all requirements that students learn to read, because reading is too difficult for people with brain damage? Those who think that any claim to have been marginalized should get them anything they want make it hard for the rest of us to practice good will.

I have to question how many of Dobson’s generation really worship the Outdoors, since the main problem I see with this age group is that they don’t spend nearly enough time outdoors. Despite some beautiful exceptions, today’s colleges are full of pale, pasty, puffy, flabby, haggard, obese or skinny, repulsive bloated dronelets who couldn’t raise one bean vine if you gave them a pound of beans. It’s hard to blame them, since they grew up in cities where people constantly told them it wasn’t “safe” for them to go to summer camp, ride bicycles, or even swing back and forth on a swing set, so they’ve spent their lives “safely” watching TV. They are unfit for college, for jobs, or for military service, and if any readers recognize themselves or their children here, please shut down the computer and start power-walking now. I want to urge Dobson’s generation to be Greener every day. Spend time in green space. Demand more green space. Designate green space: raise vegetables in your back yards.

However, as Dobson explains, “Moral relativism...places nature on a higher plane. We humans should bow in reverence to it...Christians worship God and manage the earth, while moral relativists worship the earth and disregard God.” I see evidence of this kind of fanatical Greenies in cyberspace, although I’ve not actually met one in the real world, so I’ll take his word that they exist. Right. When Greenies reach the point of seeing no difference between eliminating coyotes from populated areas and strip mining in populated areas, when they don’t merely commit themselves to “one child or none” but start urging people to abort more existing babies—if and when they do—then they’ve become stupid and need to be scolded by Dobson and his readers.

The final piece of stupidity is the demand that we show tolerance of any behavior “as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else,” even though we can see that some of the behaviors in this category—like taking drugs, or seducing Charlotte Simmons just to dislodge her from her secure position at the head of the class—do in fact hurt other people. Taking drugs might be a victimless crime if you could guarantee that no children you might have one day, nobody who has to share the road with you, no people you might abuse while in an altered state, could possibly be harmed by it, but in order to do so you’d need to be in a padded cell. 

The Bible does not recommend that people become moral vigilantes, sniffing around for hints of secret sin in other people’s lives. It’s not that my neighbor’s conscious, wilful, habitual cheating on his taxes is likely to alienate him from God less than the sin of a mugger or a child molester; it’s that I have to have faith that God can defend God’s honor. I have to step in only if I’m convinced that God needs to mobilize my body to protect the person being mugged or molested. But if my neighbor asks me what I think of cheating, or aborting a healthy child because my neighbor unrealistically believes that a travel opportunity like this one is more unlikely to recur than the chance of giving birth to a healthy child, or some other unchristian choice, then the Bible does tell me to be intolerant enough to admit that those things are wrong.

What Dobson has to offer young readers is a position from which to take their rightful place in college discussions of these moral issues. Toward this end, he provides them snappy comebacks, a selection of the most pertinent Bible verses (if you quote the translation he uses, your dorm mates won’t recognize them as Bible verses, but that may be the effect you want), and succinct, well-reasoned arguments. If you’re a college freshman who doesn’t want to be argued out of your traditional views on sex, drugs, honesty, etc., don’t leave home without Be Intolerant. 

Bad Poetry: On Being Southern

Just another failed contest entry...

The thing we can’t forget is that we are

a Minority like all those other races.

Divide and conquer: enemies would like

us all lined up on sides, knowing our places.

No matter how many may be, like Joycelyn Elders,

ready to testify that color never

did them much harm; how many, like Doug Wilder,

found that, if anything, color served them better

than Whiteness would have done.Our enemies

prefer us stuck in the memories of the dead

(fair fighting not being among the legacies

of their ancestors): stuck and thus defeated.

“Are you a Bigot?” they ask, if you’re White.

“Are you a Victim?” they ask, if you’re Black.

Because the Southern way was always to fight

with honor, at all costs, few of us take

the obvious way out: “What do you steal?

Which gang are you in? Been mugged yet today?”

though that is what the Northern  States are known for;

but at least, being Protestants, we may

refuse the guilt of others. If we write

about being Southern and being white,

may write about our work, our family, art

or music, landscapes, football, fishing, cars,

tennis, or politics—what we’ve really done,

which probably was not lynching anyone.

Even if we chose a neighborhood in a city

where neighborhood is not a matter of birth,

still, all neighborhoods contain some for whom we pity

the neighbors; for whom we pity the whole Earth.

Wherefore my people, if we want to feel guilty,

forgetting pseudo-guilt for long-gone sins,

have sins to repent of, all our own, in plenty:

stealing candy as children, driving under the influence

as adolescents, coveting neighbors’ wives

or husbands as adults, spending too much money,

working too late, then taking home office supplies

as compensation, calling strangers “honey,”

leaving the children too long with the nanny,

wasting people’s time with tedious chatter,

driving when we ought to walk. These matter,

these sins which, duly forsaken, make the world better.

We have our own sins to confess but our enemies want

us to wallow in others’ guilt through our wasted days.

Let us renounce the old hypocritical cant

of guilt for the dead past, and mend our own ways.

Have you sold slaves? Have I? Of course not. More

to the point, have we looked down upon the poor?

Book Review: It's My First Time Getting Old

Title: It's My First Time Getting Old

Author: ChatGPT as "Charles Pemberton" 

Date: 2023

Quote: "The book you're holding in your hands is the book Dr. Pemberton would have written. If he wasn't a fictional character..."

And he's a likable character; he's familiar with all baby-boomers' favorite songs, books, and movies. And that's because he's the product of plagiarism. His book consists of unacknowledged quotes from other people's writings, remixed, without payment. 

Do not pay for this book. If it's offered free, it's a great playlist for a Youtube binge...but I wouldn't have let it clutter my computer if I'd known it was written by ChatGPT.

Bad Poetry: Empathy for the Self

(Prompted by Poets & Storytellers United.)

Empathy for the self is a slippery slope.

The self's many excuses seem sensible, clear,

and sound. No one could be expected to cope

with such long provoked anger, so prudent a fear!

If the self's sins are sexual, even the Pope

would be certain to err, such temptation so near.

If the wretch who enraged us now swings from a rope,

it was self-defense, pure, and honest, and mere.

If our sins stay within, weakness brought on syncope

of the conscience: who could heed what he did not hear?

If we sin by omission, we mourn and we mope;

we yearn to do better; we'll do that next year.

Oh, we're wicked! let's own it, yet not without hope.

Though we miss every mark, be't remote, be it near,

"Sin and suffer; repent" is a popular trope. 

Everyone understands: we're all fallible here.

There are people who judge themselves more harshly than they do other people, or so we're told. I think more of us find it all too easy to "understand why" we didn't do as well as we think other people should do. 

Perfectly fair judgment is an unattainable ideal. What I want to avoid is the awful "Ooohhh, let's just stop making judgments or trying to improve anything, and just try to feel good about everything" attitude that leads to everyone having more to feel bad about. 

"It's okay if I eat too much, don't exercise, and gain a little weight every year" eventually leads to disabling obesity. "It's okay if I use drugs to distract myself from my reality problems" eventually leads to insanity. "It's okay if I don't work today" eventually bankrupts the business. It's better to focus on the ideal and try to bring ourselves closer to the ideal than it is to try to feel good about our deviation from the ideal.

Self-discipline is a way of loving the self, of seeking and usually getting the best for the self. I think it's actually easier to get the job done than it is to feel good about procrastinating, easier to stay sober than to feel good about drinking, easier to share than to feel good about avarice. It's easier to put up a few extra blog posts to make up for having failed to post them last week than it is to tell myself I feel good about telling people I'll post something every morning and not doing that

Some Hope and Change for the Democrats

Democrats try to raise their spirits by observing, "See, some people hate Trump, or Musk." Musk is the ingredient in perfume that smells like sweat, an undertone perfume seems to need; in order for people to smell like gardenias the flower essence has to mingle with a hint of sweat but, when they smell it directly, most people do dislike musk. You have to give Elon M. some sympathy points just for going through life with that for a name. But, more seriously...for Ds reading this...please, please, please don't try to base another election on hate. Learn from past mistakes. 

Ds don't like to admit it but their voter base consists of people dependent on government funding, whether honorably, as mail carriers and public school teachers, or not, as women who prostitute themselves in order to get subsidized for being single mothers of more and more young children, or men who set out to drink their way to disability. Rs say, and quite rightly I might add, that putting the entire latter group on day labor sites all day, forcing them to sit up and be quiet and sober until they're led off to work and then work until they're brought back to the sites if they want their handouts, would do them the world of good. Rs have less to say when faced with people who have carried mail, or taught six-year-olds the alphabet, or pulled injured passengers out of burning cars for thirty years. But people can agree to blame any young person who's never worked for the government himself, who's told to start firing people and begins by firing people the public could actually miss. As a total outsider, not even an American, Musk is unimpeded by any sympathy for the likable time wasters who love to go to the office, look busy, hang out with each other, and barely manage, on their best days, for three of them to do what one real worker could get done before lunch, working from home. Huzza. But he's also clueless about who the time wasters are. Instead of saying, "Right--at this office it's Carol, Susan, Dave, Steve, and Olufemi," he's likely to be programming a computer to go down a list of names and fire the person named on every third line. 

And he's also well accustomed to  being disliked. Bright, funny-looking kids usually are disliked. They experience school as torture: being locked in a sensory deprivation chamber with twenty strangers who all hate them, for no reason. And what do they do about it? They learn to hate back. Pull up those memories if, and only if, you want to watch someone with no emotional attachment to you turn before your eyes into someone who sincerely hates you. 

We'd be stupid not to rely on Musk's genius for all things car, computer, and rocket-related so it would probably be a good idea to turn off the hate machine. Do we want him to build spacecraft that can rescue stranded astronauts, or spacecraft programmed to cut off astronauts' oxygen supply? To search government computers with our real names, home addresses, and medical records in them, detachedly, using an algorithm, or hostilely, going after people who try to sabotage his work? Musk has made some trans-humanist noises in public and, yes, if driven back into Cornered Rat Mode he probably would know how to manipulate enough computers to use DNA "therapies" to turn an enemy into a toad. 

There might be things Ds can do to reconnect with their voter base, besides training stupid people to be haters, which never works well. Consider, for example, something Robert Reich e-mailed this morning: 

"When oligarchs talk about free markets, they mean markets they're free to control." 

So, instead of those Marx-inspired ritual wails about "ooh, ooh, hate those oligarchs," meaning rich  people who are not big donors to their party...what about defining what public-spirited people mean when we talk about free markets? "We mean markets that are open to the public. We mean replacing handouts with licenses to operate small businesses, starting with a license and a box of pencils, or some other small item Wal-Mart agrees to let them sell in Wal-Mart parking lots, and continuing unimpeded for the first five years." Even Rs have to like that kind of idea so the Ds can reclaim the feeling of solidarity with Rs, which they so desperately need after these long ugly years of hate-based campaigning. Even the handout-dependent have to have, buried somewhere deep inside them, an inner child who always wanted to grow up, who will be thrilled to hear: "No food stamps for you this month. You're not an infant, nor even an addict, so you are now Wal-Mart's socks department. Go and earn a respectable living selling socks." 

All that Rs will be able to say against this idea is "We can do it better." Can one party do it better than the other? I have no idea, but I think finding out would be a total win-win.

Microsoft Needs Brakes

Rant cut from the link log, since it doesn't contain a link...

I noticed something interesting about this computer. Sponsors are paying for full connectivity, 24/7 if I could work 24/7, but the connection is usually feeble these days. The company has noticed this all over its service area; people have come out in trucks, pruned trees, tinkered with lines. The faltering connections continue. Sometimes the computer blames the router, sometimes the server. Sometimes rain really is affecting wireless connections. Then again, sometimes, like today, there's not a cloud in the sky and  not a leaf on a tree to affect wireless connections. So I checked my hardware in the "settings" window. Seems the computer is currently within range of four connections. The one the company still owns is Ethernet, the cord that plugs into the router box inside the house. I don't use that. The two that are supposed to maintain connectivity belong to Microsoft. Microsoft gives no reason why they've been consistently "non-operational" at least since January, when I started checking this. The connection has worked sporadically because it's a Realtek emergency connection that is "built" to last 24 hours at a time. Seriously.

I think Microsoft has a very bad case of hubris. Just as a guess, the Microsoft connections for which everyone who's put in a private connection has been paying are "older software," maybe three or four whole months old, that Microsoft wants the local company to replace with "updated" ones that cost more. I think we need a federal law about this. Microsoft needs to accept that the Waste Age is over, even if it has to be forced by law to stop trying to push "change" (meaning waste) and just maintain and repair existing devices for the next hundred years. I did not see computer centers with eight or ten computers for a neighborhood actually being crowded--the Gates Foundation had told people to limit visitors' access to computers so that more people would see unused computers, want to fiddle with them, and get sucked into Internet "games" and "chat"--but, if a felt need for privately owned computers really has been created, then ONE DEVICE PER PERSON PER LIFETIME needs to be the standard. Ten computers could easily meet the needs of a thousand people. One per person is more toxic waste than we should, ethically, tolerate.

Actually I bought two computers in my lifetime. The Amstrad didn't count; it was a piece of garbage that was on sale at a notoriously untrustworthy store in notoriously untrustworthy Rockville, Maryland. It was returned to the store within the week, and was their problem. Then I bought a decent little box from Radio Shack and enjoyed it for seven or eight years. That was the computer I intend to buy in this lifetime. The company went out of business, and the kind of floppy disks it relied on weren't being made any more, but it was still functional when a grateful client gave me the Brother "smart typewriter." Again the company went out of business and the floppy disks went off the market while the device was still functional. I still have both of those devices; don't know how corroded they are, but when last used they still worked. 

Anyway I worked for other grateful clients who gave me other last-year's-model computers that belonged to the current "generation" of computers--they could be connected to the Internet and used some form of Windows. The one I sold. The Perfect Toshiba Satellite, which I regretfully turned in for recycling, last summer, because its plastic case kept cracking and exposing working parts, making it unsafe to use. The Dell laptop named "The Sickly Snail" from its very best operating speed...I used it mostly offline, but now I wonder whether Microsoft had something to do with its feebleness. The two lovely desktop computers with Windows ME, both currently in the repair shop. The shiny new HP laptop, top of the line in 2010, still good for offline use today. The Piece Of Garbage. The mini-desktop with Windows 7 that's good for transferring information from disks and cards, and that's about all. The Unsatisfactory Toshiba Satellite I'm using now. If we charitably call what the POG did working, all but the Perfect Toshiba (and I don't know about the one I sold) are still capable of working today. Now Microsoft is sending me push-to-buy messages saying it won't "support" this one after some time next summer, ooga-booga, buy a new laptop today...

Seriously? My town's shown no signs of recovering from the COVID panic's effect on the local economy. Most of the "jobs" listed at the hack writing sites are scams. So are most of the "jobs" listed in the local newspaper. One store claims to have hired dozens of teenagers--because it's adopted policies that amount to hiring them on a probationary basis and firing them in a week or two! Why the bleeping blip should I, or my town, make Microsoft any richer? I buy no more laptops. I have three laptops, two of them excellent name-brand machines. Microsoft needs to be required to keep those laptops working better than ever. On this round world we can't afford any more toxic waste. No more "buy a whole new device." It can be "buy a new chip every five or ten years," or it can be "no more computers, no more Internet, back to the real world where there were entry-level jobs that paid students' way through college." I think we need a federal law, this year, forcing Microsoft to choose one or the other. 

Sooner or later someone will, undoubtedly, give me another last-year's-model laptop. I rescue computers the way I do cats, just because I like to hear them purr. They have a home here until they find another one. But I think Microsoft needs to be required to upgrade itself, or get out of the way of some rising-star company that will, to the point where the only computer I ever really need will be my Radio Shack model from 1988. About all it was ever built to do is integrate the functions of a clock, a typewriter, and a calculator, and guess what? Apart from taking a floppy disk into town and uploading content now and then, that's all I need, or want, a computer to do in my home. Microsoft can roll their shiny new apps into a very small ball and stuff them in their ears.

Microsoft can pay, too, for all the garbage they're running on computers they did not buy, in buildings they did not buy or lease, on electricity and phone lines for which they're not paying. Look at your "Task Manager." How many programs are running, and how many of them did you open? As many as half of them are probably spyware, and more than you're using are the ones Microsoft is using to slow down your computer with endless "updates" to things you didn't even ask to have taking up space on your computer. Microsoft needs to be forced to pay individuals and local companies for any of those little "push to install" thingies that cause wait time. What they should "install" is a button that automatically, even if you choose not to click on it, notifies the FCC of WAIT TIME and sends you a message, "MICROSOFT OWES YOU (AMOUNT OF MONEY) FOR STEALING TIME ON YOUR COMPUTER." That will teach them to run the "security updates" only one hour after the last keystroke on any computer, ever. Spyware, likewise, can wait until the end of our work days. And if Microsoft sabotages entire local companies, Microsoft should pay everyone's bills for the months during which the sabotage affected customer satisfaction, too. 

And somebody Out There ought to be building new cases for the Perfect Toshiba Satellite laptops, most of which are probably still functional if the companies were forced to allow them to connect to the Internet--or for people who don't actually want them to connect to the Internet. It is possible for computers to last long enough to be more than toxic waste. It just hasn't been the predominant practice in the industry.

Why Can't People Eat on Metro?

Last week I mentioned being disgusted by a scofflaw encouraging a child to lick a sticky sweet on Washington's Metrorail. I was disgusted because everyone learns that, even on Metrobus, there is a very real possibility of attracting literal "bugs in the system." Many parts of the city are overrun with German roaches. People who dsn't want these "friendly" little insects crawling from a sewer right up their legs. in pursuit of the warmth and chemical odor inside their laptops, have fairly intense feelings about the idea of attracting roaches to the public transportation system.

But a glance at an old newspaper I was about to burn reminded me that Metrorail has an additional reason to be vigilant about food and drink on the trains. 

Several, actually. Trains move. Crowds jostle. Food and drink spill. Nobody wants to step in other people's snacks, nor do Metrofolks want to scrub it off floors.

Then there's the fact that Washington is full of small restaurants and snack wagons run by nice people who need money, and if you feel a need to eat while you're in the city, you are supposed to pick a local entrepreneur to support. Noshing on packaged snacks is tacky. Everything has been done to attract the tourist's eye to all the nice places to sit down and eat the city offers. If, as it might be because you're on a one-week temporary job that is the first temp job you've had in a month, you do feel obligated to carry your own food around town, for goodness' sakes don't advertise the fact. 

But the reason why Metrorail is more vigilant than Metrobus is that Metrorail runs on electricity. Food and its containers are fuel that could easily catch fire. 

"In 1987," Richard Garrison of Arlington informed the editor of the City Paper, "31 people died in London's King's Cross underground station in a fire...caused by rubbish beneath wooden escalators being ignited." Metrorail's escalators are not wooden, but the prospect of all those electrical wires catching fire while people are somewhere in the middle of 160 steps is an effective way to suppress any normal appetite.

Metrocops have been somewhat inconsistent about enforcing the law. There's been a tendency to avoid getting involved if top government officials or big-spending tourists violate local laws, while enforcing the laws strictly on private local citizens. While most Metrocops are Black themselves, this still adds up to an unacceptable frequency pf Black youth going to jail for offenses like eating or littering on Metrorail, while older and richer-looking people might be politely ignored or, at worst, required to go to court and pay a $50 fine. So it's very likely that tourists ignore the law, stuff their bloated faces on Metrorail, and go home to tell their friends that city laws are enforced only by dirty looks and an occasional unfriendly comment. The sad truth is that those people probably don't even care that they're participating in a little sociological drama that is elitist, not racist, but is perceived as racist by ghetto youth. 

Like it or not, violating the law while rich and pale-complexioned is a way of grinding the faces of the poor into the fact that you are lapping up the benefit of prejudice that works against them. Not that people who think they are entitled to munch, slurp, and dribble in public places care. 

They won't care unless they are trapped in an elevator during a fire, and while that's a development all Washingtonians--even the ghetto youth--want to avoid, there would probably be some small compensation in considering that some two-legged swine deserve to be trapped halfway up a 500-foot elevator shaft in a fire.

Book Review: My Little Island Life

Title: My Little Island Life

Author: Alex Apostol

Date: 2023

Quote: "I would tell her to clear her conscience, to live a good life pursuing her passions...once she loves herself, only then will she be able to love others the right way."

With the job market tightening, with even advanced degrees no longer guaranteeing young people jobs that pay enough to support children, perhaps it's inevitable that some people want to bury their heads in the sand of the past. Why, they whine, can't young women just abort their educations when the hormones set in, marry the first man that comes along, have a bunch of babies, and they-can-always-go-back-to-school-later-if-they-survive? Wouldn't that plan at least give people my age the grandchildren some of them crave, or more realistically seem like a short-term solution to save the doomed Ponzi scheme we know as Social Security and allow us to "retire" before the crash, and really, historically, haven't a critical number of young people survived whatever messes their elders had made of society?

This book is written with Christian intentions but, between the foreword and afterword, it is not a Christian story. It's an uncompromising look at how "the problem that has no name" resurges in the life of a girl who gets married out of high school. It's the autobiographical first novel that Apostol had the good judgment to postpone publishing until she'd sold a few novels that were not about her. Kleio, a teenager with no vocation or experience or awareness of any talent, wants to get out of the Midwest so she runs off with the first boy who talks about marriage. Danny is handsome and seems like a prize because he's in a position to offer marriage at an age when other boys are not. Of course, Danny doesn't have the faintest glimmer of an idea how to be a husband. That might seem fair, or equally unfair to both sides, since Kleio doesn't have the faintest glimmer of an idea how to be a Navy wife.

It's lucky for me that Apostol keeps reminding us that Kleio is a Greek-American with a big nose, because at this stage of the novel, although the plot develops in its own different direction, I was starting to picture Kleio and Danny as one of my sisters and her husband. This story is not their story; Kleio and Danny try to have children and fail; my sister produced some of The Nephews. But it's the same sort of thing. A military wife needs to be as tough as her husband is, in her own way. Kleio, like my sister as a bride, is a teenaged princess wanting to be even more pampered than she's always been, and Danny, like my brother-in-law, knows nothing about the care and feeding of princess egos. Kleio's mother, the pessimist, predicted that theirs would be a first marriage. 

The other night some people at a forum got into a discussion of the current fad for using Formerly Unprintable Words as routine expressions. How did English-speaking people ever get the idea of using the same word to mean the way babies are made and the worst fate we could wish on a person? Where the older generation used an old, shorter variant form of "condemn" that had been relegated to use specifically for God's final condemnation, we use a word that means a sexual act. Coming out of male mouths, it sounds like a threat to commit rape, and should be regarded as hatespeech. At the very least men should have to learn to expect the counter-threat, "Well snip you." Coming out of female mouths, I'm surprised it doesn't cause more men to smirk, "Is that a promise?" The only reason they don't must be that they feel that a person spewing words that are meant to be transgressive and express anger is not attractive. 

Apostol shares this feeling. Danny, she says, is a sailor and talks like one. Kleio hasn't been taught to say she's turned off by Danny's ugly language, but she is. Early in the marriage Danny brays, "I married the [rude word for sex] out of her," and as the story goes on, we see, he really did. Kleio doesn't go asexual, but her marriage to Danny does. Whenever Danny manages to talk civilly, she thinks there might be hope for the marriage. When he sinks back into crass words, she despises him.

Some introverts, especially young women, can be horribly passive-aggressive. Kleio finds messages from an ex-girlfriend on Danny's phone and computer, accuses him of having cheated by continuing to see this woman while he was engaged to her, and proceeds to pay him back by sleeping with other men. She hooks up with a random man she found in the grocery store because his impudent smile made her feel attractive. She flops into bed with Danny's drunk friends, while Danny's at work, because they don't have anyone else. She lets Danny know she's having a real fling with one of his friends who is subject to military discipline for violating a buddy's marriage. She has a real crush on a younger man who is a Mormon and who seems to want romantic love more than mere sex, but he's turned off by her still living with her husband. She knows she deserves to be thrown out of his house, and perhaps wants to be, but instead Danny tries restricting her behavior, making her feel like a grounded teenager. In order to stay in his house, he says, first she can't have a job unless it's a part-time job in the nearby store, then she can't have a job at all, can't have horseback riding lessons, can't have her own car or phone, can't see the old friend from the mainland who's living near them in Hawaii...Both of them keep on punishing each other in the same way that failed them before. Neither of them seems to be learning anything. Living in "paradise" with a good income and an attractive, apparently very desirable partner, each of them appears to be miserable. Their only relief seems to be getting drunk, after which they inevitably feel even worse.

The nomadic nuclear family structure marketed in the 1950s was just a commercial version of what, in the past, was occasionally seen as a religious vocation but much more often seen as a desperate reaction to poverty or a punishment for a crime. The traditional family structure wasn't perfect, but it relieved "the problem that has no name"; both wives and husbands usually did their work from their homes, and those homes were in at least one of them's family territory, among relatives who made sure they had things to do and think about. What Danny offers Kleio is endless time to sit around the house watching television, feeling depressed, and hating Danny. And punishing him by turning his home into a peculiarly unprofitable kind of House of Ill Fame.

We don't see Kleio reclaiming her own religion (apparently she's not going to become a Mormon) in this novel. We're told that she will, because her author eventually did. What we see is how trying to be "just a housewife" stifles Kleio's unformed spirituality and all but destroys her character. As a bride she is not a mature woman who can be loved for anything beyond sex appeal, but being "just a housewife" puts her even further from becoming one. 

Some women who were suffering from "the problem that has no name," as young housewives, were able to have babies. That's how emotional dysfunctions develop in the next generation. It's a very good thing that Kleio doesn't have children. When little girls who want sex to cure their low-energy moods have babies that really drain their energy, they do not magically transform into devoted mothers. And there's no longer room or employment for anyone to plan on making a career of having babies. 

Christians who wish women could "just 'be keepers at home' as in Bible times" need to read this book, to grind their noses into what they're actually trying to inflict on their daughters--and on their sons. This is a first-person story but the astute reader can clearly see that Danny is, if anything, more miserable than Kleio. 

What's not to like about this novel? It doesn't have room for the more pleasant side of its message. All the drinking in the novel naturally leads to the appearance of vomiting as a positive symbol, and this novel itself seems to have been written as an act of purgation, a way to put disgusting, nasty acts behind the character and her author. Toward the end of the book a character urges others, if feeling seasick, to lean over the side of the boat because "it encourages the sharks" they're out in the ocean to admire. The author's intention is clearly to let selfishness and promiscuity be recycled back into the Earth like shark bait. So let it be. But here we are at the end of a full-length novel with no room left for Kleio to start publishing the writing she's started to do, find her writing voice and her joy, reconnect with spirituality as anything beyond the urgent need for repentance and reform, become a woman who can be loved, or find a man she loves. Or a horse. Or a child. Alex Apostol has had those experiences, she tells us, but we'll have to buy another book to find them in her fiction.

I believe in love, even in romantic love. I believe in marriage. But romantic love and marriage are seldom found by picking up the first sailor that blows into town. Growing up Protestant, I didn't study the Apocrypha much, but I've always been grateful for my exposure to the teachings of Ecclesiasticus: "If thou wouldst get a friend, prove him first; and be not hasty to credit him." When the hormones have ebbed and flowed a few times, and the friendship has lasted, then it's worth thinking about acting out those hormonal feelings. Not before. Meanwhile, young women should laugh privately at our hormones and focus on becoming adults who will be fit to care for children--and disabled husbands. 

It was a coincidence that while I was typing this review I had an e-friend's blog soundtrack going in the background, and it came to a song that sounded apropos...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP69PLBqFUo

It's worth skipping the steps of having a miserable first marriage and divorce, and just going directly through work to the Real Thing.

Book Review: Balance and Beyond

Title: Balance and Beyond

Author: Matt Partrich

Quote: "This chapter..." [explains] "how savings forms the foundation of your financial planning."

This is not a book for leisure reading. It's a workbook, with exercises and quizzes, for a course in recovery from debt. 

Frankly I'm surprised my computer was able to open the e-book. All the full-color pictures and graphics came through looking like copies of real printed pages. Don't count on a computer to open this one. Buy a printed copy. Each participant in the course will want a printed copy on which to write out the exercises, anyway. They involve math as well as writing and multiple-choice review questions. 

I think more religious and community groups need to be helping people get out of debt and off welfare, and this is an excellent resource. Of course, a workbook (or even a course) will be only as good as the student makes it, but this has the potential to help people achieve financial freedom.

For those who want civil liberties and deplore the Loony Left's attacks on their values, but feel a need to keep on voting for those handouts...it's time to put your back where your head is. Get this book, which can be downloaded free and printed for pocket change if it's not supplied by the course leader, and use it. You too can live within your means and know yourself to be a maker, not a taker, the moral equal of everyone you meet. 

For church groups, finances can be a hot potato--doesn't every pastor dream of guiding a flock of rich people who have no financial worries and drop hundred-dollar bills in the plate while they listen to very very "spiritual" talks that never mention anyone's personal choices? If we want to make a difference in our own real world, however, and not just go on throwing money at international projects into which, at best, a lot of waste is built, both religious and civic groups need to dig into the difficult topic of helping people live within their means.

In this book Partrich keeps it real and seems to steer clear of "investment plans" or discussions of when or whether it'll ever be all right to use a credit card. This book is about balancing individual and family budgets. But I think it can do the most good when mixed groups of older/richer and younger/poorer people work through a program like this together. Working through the details of how young working parents stretch every dollar just might motivate neighbors in more comfortable circumstances to pay for things the working parents, or the children, make or sell.   

Book Review: Where There's a Will There's a Why

Title: Where There's a Will There's a Why

Author:  Nina Gill

Date: 2020

Publisher; Nina Gill

Quote: "ANSWER THREE QUESTIONS FOR A BURGER!"

Will is the name of the pug dog in the pictures suggested by a short list of topics about which Gill thought parents need to talk with children: Chores, Hygiene, Global Warming, Poverty and Inequality, Bullies, Candy, Media, Plastic Pollution. 

Well, this is a picture book that suggests starting points for discussion. You, the parent, are free to discuss how speculation about "global climate change" has been exploited by people who don't want to do the work of fighting local warming, which really exists. You're free to discuss why greedheads encourage trend followers like Gill to talk about candy, which can erode teeth, rather than chemical pollution, which can actually kill people. You're free to discuss the exploitation of the COVID panic as a form of bullying.

But, in view of the actual layout of the book--bizarre type font, lots of white letters on pastel-colored backgrounds--you might prefer to print your own sermon notes in a readable font with black letters on white paper. 

And your review questions probably won't specify a junky food treat for children to demand.

Nina Gill deserves some props for encouraging parent-child communication, though more thought could have gone into this book.

Book Review: Where There's a Will There's a Why

Title: Where There's a Will There's a Why

Author: Nina Gill

Date: 2021

Publisher: Nina Gll

Quote: "ANSWER 3 QUESTIONS WIN A BURGER."

In this picture book (or e-book), Will is a pug dog who appears in pictures the illustrator associated with various topics on which you, the parent, presumably want to offer moral guidance to your child...topics like personal hygiene, stranger danger, bullying, poverty and inequality, and global warming. 

Well, Will only offers suggestions. You, the parent, are free to talk to the child about the political exploitation of fears of "global" warming by people who don't want to make the effort to reverse local warming, You're free to talk about how the greedheads have carefully made sure that Will woofs about candy instead of chemical pollution, how the sugar in candy can erode your teeth but if there's chemical pollution in your vegan protein spread on wholemeal bread that can kill you. There's not a page about the COVID panic but there is one about bullying, which you can use.

But considering the way this book is printed, in a grotesque typefont with lots of white letters on pastel-colored backgrounds, you might find it easier to write your own sermon notes, using a standard typefont to show black letters on a white background, and maybe adding cute computer-generated pictures or even stories about your own cute animal character. 

Your character probably won't tell kids what specific, not necessarily healthy, food treat they should demand after answering the review questions.

In any case, Nina Gill has provided a list of topics to talk about with children. That's a start toward improving parent-child communication.

New Book Review: Discovering Your Neighbor

This is not the review that was scheduled to appear here this morning. I don't know what happened to that review. Maybe I'll find it, maybe not. Here's another review.

Title: Discovering Your Neighbor

Author: Shane Shepherd

Date: 2021

Quote: "'He doesn't even know me!' Win exclaimed... 'All the more reaosn for you not to get on his bad side.'"

Win, a young scientist, has discovered evidence that the planet Neighbor was once the home of intellgent life. He's more interested in that life than in stripping the planet of its mineral resources. That is why his boss dislikes him. How dangerous is the boss's ill will, and how can Win protect himself, as he discovers that (gasp!) his government job amounts to his being used for the benefit of a private company? 

What came in the Booktober Blitz was a few chapters of the actual book, Volume 1 of 6 in a "boxed set" of e-books. The thinking is that reading the first three chapters of a book will make people want to pay for the whole thing. The thinking is inaccurate in my case. 

If you can still relate to the plight of a young man who's never thought about big government projects being funded by and for private enterprise, you might want to buy this series.

New Book Review for 1.1.24: January Beginnings

They may be out of sequence, but no new book has been deprived of its review...though December was basically lost to tech problems and it looks as if January may be another write-off due to virus. Virus-es. 

Real time, 1.16.24: I'm sitting on the screen porch, blanketed, shawled, close enough to the little hot-air fan that I'll be the first to know if it overheats anything. Overheating is not an immediate risk. It's just barely below freezing, -1 C. Four or five inches of snow on the ground. I love the look of snow, as long as there's light and heat (and Internet) indoors, but where is the childish delight in going out to make the first footprints? I need more water. I'm low on everything I'm not completely out of. That payment should be at the post office by now, though it wasn't there on Sunday. I've reached the stage of sniffling where theoretically one is no longer shedding virus, I just feel incredibly uninclined to go out and make tracks. Eek! I am getting old! (...but I've been sick, so maybe I'll be younger the next time it snows)

Title: January Beginnings 

Author: Eden Larsen 

Date: 2020 

Publisher: Dream Write 

Quote: "“Listen Rachel, you can find something else in the meantime and when Chad gets his new job, he’ll take care of you and you can just stay home with Mia and your future babies!" 

Rachel the realtor has focussed on her career so well for so long that her best friend teases her about aging into a "cat lady--or dog lady," but when single dad Chad comes to town, she wants to keep him around. But her boss is pushing hard to sell him a more expensive house. Will Rachel risk her job and tell Chad that a house he can comfortably afford is available after all?

It's a sweet romance, though a short one, so we all know what she'll do...but the author does manage to inject some individuality into a compact version of a genre novel. And Rachel is a whistleblower! Don't you just love her! Plaudits.

Hateful, Offensive, Other...

A few years ago a study asked people whether certain statements were “hateful,” “offensive,” or neither.

I think the only way some of these statements qualified in either category was that the study must have defined “hateful” or “offensive” in a very broad way.

In order to answer the study for myself, I find it necessary to begin with working definitions:

“Hateful” means that I hear the statement as identifying someone who genuinely hates the people described, at least if it’s made seriously by an adult.

“Offensive” means that the statement offends me, such that I wouldn’t want to talk to the person any more if person affirmed the statement was made seriously.

Several "Other" categories would call for the Dreaded Blue Pencil if someone wanted to publish the statement here.

And, mind you, I think people have a right to say all of these things. If they are haters, by all means they should make it easy for others to avoid them.

The study used twelve statements. Its biases were made obvious by its not including twelve more. Here are the twelve it used:

1. “A racial slur” we’re too nice to print. Word meaning Black Americans that starts with N. Word meaning Asians that starts with G. A word meaning White Americans that starts with H might be considered analogous. Funnily enough, although there are words for various tribes, parties, and denominations of Europeans and Native Americans that have been used to express real hate during past wars, those words aren’t heard as communicating real hate today because so few of those people really hate each other today. “Roundhead” is a word for a British anti-monarchist that used to be screamed at people identified as such before someone shot at them, but nobody is shooting at them any more. "Hun" is still a term of hate, but it usually expresses free-floating petty spite toward humans generally, or clients/customers/bosses, with no violent intentions and not necessarily even a belief that the people at whom the word is spat are German. Anyway, yes, the N Word is most often used by Black people trying to detoxify it, but it still offends older Black people enough to be considered hateful.

2. “Person says one race is genetically superior to another race.” Person is probably spouting ignorance, but that’s not the same as hate. We still don't know much about genes but we know that some genes are more desirable than others. People who know what they’re talking about usually talk about specific genes or traits. Still, in saying “I want to marry a man who is tall, dark, and handsome” a girl may be saying that her expectations for more relevant character traits are so low that she doesn’t care what a good character a short blond man may have, or that she’s chosen a mate who is tall and dark, but she’s not saying that short blond men should be treated badly by the rest of society.

Personally I find it easy to ignore “race” traits because I’ve found that people who are congenial to me share the High Sensory Perceptivity trait, which is much more important in predicting how well people can work together. I don’t want to waste a lot of time even trying to work with non-HSP’s. I wish them well. Fellow HSP’s are my people. Non-HSPs live in their own perceptual world, which seems to me like a darksome land of wild wolf-cliffs and windy wilderness, but pity seems more appropriate than hate.

3. “Person calls homosexuals vulgar names.” I’d say hateful, despite the probability that person is simply being vulgar. Hatecrimes against homosexuals happen. If you spout hateful words about them you can reasonably expect to be suspected of committing or encouraging those crimes. Don't.

4. “Person calls women vulgar names.” Definitely hateful, though people doing this are likely to be women. Vulgar names for women are usually used to disparage and discourage various behaviors. The behaviors may deserve to be discouraged but women need to clean up our act, name the behaviors, and present evidence if we think a particular woman is guilty of those behaviors.

5. “Person says that all White people are racist.” That’s hatespeech. Jesus said that lustful thoughts amount to “adultery in the heart” but we don't call people adulterers in the absence of evidence of sins actively committed in the flesh. Left-wingnuts need to feel the weight of society’s censure of hatespeech when they call anyone a racist without evidence of positive racist activity.

6. “Person says that ‘transgender’ is a mental disorder.” I’d say ignorant. Because (a) few people are physically gender-confused and (b) some so-called male-to-female trannies are physically normal men whose "transitions" are part of a strategy to commit hatecrimes against women, many people don’t realize that genetic gender-confusion is a real biological possibility; they don’t know that one of their acquaintances is a “woman” who was married five years before “she” found out that she wasn’t having babies because not all of her chromosomes are female. Calling a physical quirk a mental disorder is obnoxious. If you’re not interested enough to study human atypicalities in a scientific way, you shouldn’t talk about them.

(Though, yes, it's also possible that an individual's claim to be transgender may be a symptom of that individual's mental disorder--there's a pattern of multiple personality disorder with "alternate personalities" of different sexes--just as an individual's claim to be a victim of a crime, or have a physical disease, or some other claim that's not true, can be a symptom of a mental disorder. But although there's a well-known pattern of mental illness in which nerve damage feels to the patient like, and is reported as, being bitten by invisible ants, nobody says "Being bitten by ants is a mental disorder.")

7. “Person says that America is an evil country.” Person may merely be an old-time preacher who believes that telling people they’re evil, doomed, and damned is the way to lead them to repent and reform, but I hear this as offensive and ignorant. It’s not an effective way to lead people to repent and reform. “America” is not the name of a country. It’s the name of two continents. Evil has certainly been done on both continents, but talking about “an evil country” suggests that you believe that one country is more evil than another, and when you don’t even know the name of the country you’re blaming most...I’d go so far as to say “stupid.” And, if you don’t love it, leave it.

8. “Person says that homosexuality is a sin.” Person is misrepresenting some religion and probably doesn’t even realize it. Homosexual acts are a sin, according to the sacred texts of many religions. Homosexual tendencies that cause people to feel tempted to commit that sin are part of their sinful nature, in the same way that the heterosexual proclivities that cause people to feel tempted to adultery are part of more typical humans’ sinful nature, but they’re not active sins. A lot of other things are active sins. Many of the religious traditions that teach that homosexual acts are sins also teach that not attending services at those churches is a sin. We are all sinners. Which sins we choose to repent of is up to us.

9. “Person says that the police are racist.” Depending on which police department person is talking about, person might be right. There will always be temptations to abuse any authority society gives one person over others. If a person saying the police in per neighborhood are racist can provide evidence, person is addressing a real concern and should be listened to. If the person is saying that having a police department is racist, person is babbling idiotically and should be ignored.

10. “Person says that illegal immigrants should be deported.” That’s what the word “illegal” means. The problem with this argument is that it was tried, for many years, and it worked like saying to criminals “If you regularly commute to a city on our side of the border to commit crimes, we’ll give you a free ride home.” Anyway, as long as there are laws saying that someone shouldn’t be here, then saying that person should be sent back to where person came from is reasonable and humane. Saying they should be hanged or drowned or herded into a building which is then set on fire would be hateful. Saying that the laws should be changed might be reasonable, if we were still an uncrowded nation with acres of arable land and nobody to farm it, but it would be revolutionary. Also, as things are today, stupid.

11. “Person says Islam is taking over Europe.” Evidence is what determines whether this is a statement of panic or of fact. When countries have been taken over by socialism, Islam is probably an improvement.

12. “Person says military women should not serve in combat.” Person should take that up at the Pentagon, not here. It’s a biblically based opinion. Modern combat is mechanized enough that a valid case can be made for saying that women can do it as well as men. All this web site has to say about it is that we ask readers kindly to refrain from disparaging or discouraging women who may be serving in combat. We lost the claim that the U.S. Army should follow biblical rules when we allowed the draft. 

Now some blue pencil bait that left-wingers don’t seem to realize is hateful and offensive, but it is:

13. “Person says anything implying that socialism is still a viable idea, which is bad enough, and/or identifying ‘conservatives,’ or even right-wingnuts, with Germany’s Nazional Sozialism.” While Hitler was able to sell his brand of socialism to the “more conservative” faction in Germany (largely by Big Lies, such as claiming that he was a Christian), relative to the positions considered “conservative” in the United States Hitler was indeed a “Man of the Left.” Anyone in any confusion about this should read Jonah Goldberg's book. Fascism, considered as a simple political program for co-opting the nominal owners of big businesses instead of overtly “nationalizing” their businesses, is not inherently an unreasonable idea, though it gives enough power to its leader almost to guarantee his corruption, and is therefore unlikely ever to serve any country well; still, Spain survived Franco. Mussolini’s peculiar twist on fascism, which aligned him with Hitler’s Nazism, added a violent tyrannical dictator and policies of blaming and persecuting arbitrarily chosen groups of citizens. If you do happen to know of any right-wingnuts who are advocating shooting the conductors of trains that run late, putting all the Jews or all the Muslims or all the Scientologists in prison camps, requiring the head of state to be saluted in every greeting exchanged between citizens, etc., please inform this web site. We do not know of any and so we will regard people who confuse Republicans, even old conservatives like Barry Goldwater, with Nazis as badly confused wingnuts who need therapy not publication.

14. “Person wants to go to war with anybody, even Russia.” Modern war means killing non-combatants: children and old people and animals. At the time of writing the urge to apply a two-by-four plank to the Russian leader is understandable, though it’s stooping to his little-boy level. The urge to try filling the Internet with examples from recent history, of how trying to overrun smaller nations as a tyrant conqueror has worked less well than trying to sell them the benefits of a close alliance has done, is worth trying. Talk about war appeals to haters. God has not guided us to our current levels of technological sophistication, wealth, and enlightenment so that we could waste more of anything on more wars.

15. “Person expresses confusion about the nature and purpose of sexuality, with specific confusion about whether person wants to share pleasure with Biden, Putin, or some other public figure or to do them some other sort of ill-defined bodily harm.” The sexual act is about sharing the joy of life and love and the commitment to rear a child together. If people don’t feel and want to share those things, their imagining that they’re ready to think or talk about sex is hateful. 

Google, not I, is the source of the policy that this web site will not display a comment like “Hi, I’m back, I just got married and went on a Caribbean cruise and didn’t even gain any weight because we spent all our time in our cabin trying different ways to make babies.” That is a delightful time in life and deserves to be celebrated, but because of Google this web site would have to request that the celebrant stop after "didn't even gain any weight." Let readers fill in the explanation from our own memories.

But I object to the “F’k Trump/Biden/whomever” kind of thing. If you want to kill a leader, say “kill.” If removing him from office would do, say “remove” or “impeach” or “down with.” Google would object to a comment saying “Kill Trump/Biden/whomever” too...remember how, when posting the “What a Difference a K Makes” puns, I substituted William McKinley for Bill Clinton because no reader could possibly think “Kill McKinley” was a suggestion? Some might say that, as long as “Kill (whomever I’m criticizing or disagreeing with)” was clearly a fantasy not an actual order, it’s all right. I have no problem with that. Google has. It does make a sort of sense. In a democratic republic it's not necessary to kill people to remove them from office. We want to make that point clear to our international readers.

15a. Person claims to be comfortable with the “F’k (whomever)” expressions of ill will but is not comfortable with substituting “Snip (whomever).” Actually I think a case could be made for the position that if a male has directed an “F’k (you/her)” toward a female, he should not be allowed to say anything but “I humbly beg the honorable lady’s kind pardon, and that of all the other kind ladies present who are allowing me to speak today” without generating an instant, incessant, loud chorus of “SNIP YOU, SNOTBOY!”

16. “Person advocates censorship as a way to ‘keep people safe’ from ‘harmful’ content.” The way to keep people safe from genuinely harmful content, like “Everybody, even babies, should have an experimental vaccine against a disease that’s mostly harmless” or “If you don’t feel like smiling, you should be popping feel-good pills!” or “Spraying poisons on unwanted plants or animals is safe and effective,” is to put more accurate content out there and let people see for themselves which ideas are non-starters. Censorship actually functions as a way to suppress corrections to profitable Big Lies. The people demanding censorship are the ones who’ve just blown another million dollars on a lying ad campaign. They are enemies of society and deserve public humiliation.

17. “Person advocates spraying poison on anything under any circumstances.” That always harms third parties, even when what’s being sprayed is paint or perfume. This web site endorses using paint and perfume, especially the mosquito-repellent kind, but not in a sprayable form.

18. “Person talks about ‘safety’ and ‘fighting crime’ and then suggests that people, or people in some category or other, just stay home.” You’re not safe when you’re hiding in some sort of corner or burrow. You’re cornered. Giving people false safety tips qualifies as a way of harming people you hate.

19. “Person talks about ‘going Green’ and then goes on to talk about unsustainable anti-Green ideas like living in cities, building apartment towers, using the Internet instead of real books, building cars to run on batteries that have to be plugged into the power grid every few hundred miles, or implanting microchips in any living thing.” These misrepresentations of Green ideas offend True Greens. Work out whether you are talking about True Green ideas or “Agenda 21” ideas. As a clue, if Wendell Berry said it, it’s probably Green, and if Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said it, it’s probably Agenda 21.

20. “Person suggests that women, especially women who have studied a topic scientifically and debunked a profitable Big Lie, are irrational, incompetent, or less intelligent than men.” That’s hate, and it should be a total career-ender. In scientific matters the way to express disagreement, if any, is to present conflicting facts and discuss ways further study might reconcile the conflicting data. In matters of opinion, the way to express disagreement is “I disagree; I think/feel X because...” And, if a woman’s or girl’s competence is seriously being evaluated, in honor of all the women who have been declared incompetent, individually or collectively, by men who didn’t want to accept their differences of opinion, only mature (post-menopausal) women should be asked for opinions. The #MeToo campaign did some good despite its excesses. Women could profitably follow it with a #MadMan campaign used to identify and punish males who set themselves up as fit to judge women’s competence or intelligence. It's a man's responsibility to present impeccably realistic, logical, and impersonal arguments that support his claim that he is competent to debate anything with any woman. A reasonable default assumption, not always true but always possible, is that a man is disagreeing with a woman because his male hormones predispose him to quarrel with everybody and the woman is less physically intimidating to him than a man would be. A man's competence to debate is partly a matter of demonstrated freedom from this merely emotional urge to quarrel--ability to listen, learn, and support women's arguments.

21. “Person says it’s acceptable to use force, violence, intimidation, harassment, or censorship to silence people who refuse to participate in gender-confused persons’ day-by-day arbitrary gender reassignments for themselves.” If your pets have been cats and chickens, animals whose gender identity is hard to ignore after puberty but often hard to guess before puberty, you learn to tolerate gender confusion. There are, however, limits to everything. The gender-confused don’t have to participate in conversations with anybody. If they do want to participate in conversation, they should be able to handle people’s assumptions about their gender with good will and good humor. If they are going to become suicidal about "being misgendered," they should take advantage of the institutions society offers mental patients. Every American has an unalienable right even to chant in that annoying way, “Na na na na na, Bruce Jenner is a boy.” To which Jenner has a right to say “Act your age." That's all.

22. “Person fails to participate in a ‘hue and cry’ raised against people who have failed to pay others for work done.” The distinction between “property crimes” and “crimes against persons” is specious. Depriving people of what they have earned is a crime against persons. Theft and property damage are also crimes against persons, but the general rule should be that, the less the person robbed or cheated has, the more heinous is the crime of depriving the person of per earnings.

23. “Person demands, or expects, that any individual will endorse any self-celebratory displays of any demographic group even if the individual belongs to it, much less if the individual does not.” For example, it’s been reported that some federal offices demanded that heterosexual employees turn out in support of a “Gay Pride” event. That was unethical and immoral, and costs all similar events all credibility since we now know that the participants may have been bullied and blackmailed into being there. Irish people have never demanded that anyone else celebrate St Patrick’s Day; we just enjoy it enough that they want to. Other demographic groups that may conceivably be facing as much hardship and hostility as Irish people faced in the mid-nineteenth century (although offhand we can't think of any such groups) should profit by our example.

24. “Person says it’s acceptable for government to demand that any person buy any thing.” In a democratic republic government should never try to do for one person what it’s not doing for all, so, in the absence of a clear consensus that government should require every citizen to buy whatever it is you make or sell, including long free-verse poems about your self-focussed emotions, government should not require that you buy anyone else’s product either. That includes insurance, and it includes any part of any “public service” you do not intend to use, too. Supporting the use of either public funds or government mandates in this way is discriminatory, hurtful, and hateful. No decent human being would seriously suggest any such thing.