Morgan Griffith on Burning the Constitution

From Congressman Morgan Griffith's E-Newsletter:

"EPA: “Burning the Constitution”

Last week at an Energy and Power Subcommittee hearing, I was honored to hear testimony regarding the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) so-called “Clean Power Plan” from legal experts including Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.  Tribe is a liberal, environmental, legal rock star.  In fact, the POLITICO inside-the-beltway news journal describes Tribe as a "liberal legal lion.”  Interestingly, Tribe taught constitutional law to President Obama, and served as a judicial adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.  He is no conservative.  But apparently he is a patriot and a defender of the U.S. Constitution.

Don’t let his relationship with the President fool you.  Tribe’s testimony slammed the Administration’s “Clean Power Plan,” saying:

“EPA is attempting an unconstitutional trifecta: usurping the prerogatives of the States, Congress, and the Federal Courts – all at once.  Much is up for grabs in this complex area.  But burning the Constitution of the United States – about which I care deeply – cannot be part of our national energy policy…”

Wow!

And this is despite the fact that Tribe instructed the first environmental law class in the United States and supports “countless” environmental causes.  Tribe may agree with the EPA’s end goal, but he doesn’t think the agency has the authority to accomplish it in this manner.

While a President or Members of Congress may wish for a certain policy to take effect, we have an obligation first to the Constitution.  As Tribe noted in his testimony:

          “EPA possesses only the authority granted to it by Congress.”

As he also noted in a December 2014 Wall Street Journal article:

“The brute fact is that the Obama Administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress.  Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid.  It does not.”

Wow!

But Tribe isn’t the only constitutional law scholar and Obama supporter to say this Administration is going too far.

Jonathan Turley, a respected George Washington University law professor who has confirmed that he voted for President Obama, said in 2012:

“In many ways, President Obama has fulfilled the dream of an imperial presidency that Richard Nixon strived for.  On everything from [DOMA] to the gaming laws, this is a President who is now functioning as a super legislator.  He is effectively negating parts of the criminal code because he disagrees with them.  That does go beyond the pale.”

Wow!

Turley has spoken out a number of times regarding this Administration’s apparent affinity for executive action and overreach, and had been tasked by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) with handling the House of Representatives’ lawsuit against the President regarding certain Administration actions relating to the Obamacare health care law.

Further, Bruce Ackerman, a Yale Law School professor described by the Washington Post as a “famous liberal constitutional law scholar” wrote in a 2014 Wall Street Journal opinion piece in regard to action against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) without congressional authority:

“[President George W.] Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority.  This is because no serious opinion can be written.”

And these three gentlemen are not the only liberal critics of this Administration’s overreach.  Among others, in a recent teletown hall, a self-described Democrat constituent indicated the only thing he agreed with me on was trying to check this Administration’s overreach.

Like the constituent, I believe that first as Americans, we must agree to defend the Constitution.  Then we have the freedom to disagree about all the other issues.

Benjamin Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional Convention, is said to have been asked what sort of government had been created.  As the story goes, Franklin responded, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

I will fight the so-called “burning of the Constitution” to ensure our Republic survives.  I pray you will do the same.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671.  To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.  Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives."

Book Review: Mind Joggers

Title: Mind Joggers

        
Author: Susan S. Petreshene

        
Date: 1985

        
Publisher: Center for Applied Research in Education

        
ISBN: 0-87628-583-3

        
Length: 208 pages of mind joggers, 14 pages of introduction

        
Quote: “For most teachers unplanned-for extra minutes occur from time to time...not enough for a formal lesson but...sufficient for a worthwhile activity...that requires no preparation.”

        
For most students, even in elementary school, these activities probably won’t make them “think.” “Think,” without emphasis, perhaps. Some cerebral activity is involved in making a list of things that are hot, explaining why “peach” is different from “carrot, potato, green bean,” or what category something fits into (“A bus is a type of transportation”)...but it’s not intense, or prolonged, or creative, or likely to be joyous thought.

        
Especially not if it’s supervised by a humor-challenged, imagination-deficient teacher: “A student once said that a broom could be used to break a window. This appeared to be nothing more than a silly response. However, when asked to explain, she said, ‘If there were a fire you could use a broom to break the window to get out.’” We all know the sequel, although Petreshene doesn’t type it out: “And then, because the other students were bored and confined, and because the teacher had called attention to Brooke’s response, they all started teasing Brooke about having given a goofy answer. And Brooke, who was mature and precocious enough to see that nobody actually wanted a good answer that was different from their own lame and stale answers, didn’t volunteer another answer in another class until her junior year at university.”

        
Anyway, this book can be used to fill in extra minutes at school, but it’s likely to get even more use if parents use it to start car games. Although these activities aren’t likely to be terribly new or stimulating for the six-to-twelve-year-old set, they probably will make four-year-olds “think,” and they will, in any case,give kids something to do besides bickering.

In the absence of conclusive evidence as to whether Petreshene is still alive, we can't offer Mind Joggers as a Fair Trade Book. However, if you send salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com $5 for the book + $5 for shipping, and you also purchase a Fair Trade Book, you will pay only one shipping charge for as many books as fit into one package, and the living writer or his or her favorite charity will receive the full 10% of the full payment.

How Little Children See Fantasy and Reality

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on April 28, 2014. Image credit: FidlerJan at Morguefile: http://cdn.morguefile.com/imageData/public/files/f/FidlerJan/01/l/142254712953aq5.jpg.)

Right...on Chatabout I promised to share a story about little children's sense of reality. The question was how to get little children to tell the truth. People had replied to that question in the sense of how to get them not to tell stories they've made up as truth. The received psychological explanation for this behavior is that little children "don't separate fantasy from reality." I've never been sure that that's the correct explanation though.

When I was a little child, I knew the difference between what I made up all by myself, what I read in books, and what I saw in real life, as well as I do now. What I didn't know was whether other people would know the difference.

And a little child I baby-sat, as a teenager, said something that convinced me that what she didn't know was whether other people knew the difference. Older children in the family were talking about their day at school. Both mentioned their official school friends and enemies. 

The youngest child waited, semi-patiently, for about an hour of this and then said something like, "And then I went up in the woods and visited my friend Suzy Strawberryful, and we went for a ride on her horse Brownie Hayful, and we visited her cousin Tracy Cakeful and played parchesi..."

"Bosh," said one of the older children, semi-patiently. "We know you stayed home all day, right? We know nobody has a name like Strawberryful. If you didn't do anything real, you shouldn't pretend you did."

The youngest child's face turned red, her face crumpled, her lip came out, and she retorted, "Suzy Strawberryful is just as real as your old Mrs. Pertaters" (one sibling's teacher had a name like Tate or Tatum) "or your Smelly Kelly or any of those people you're always talking about!" 

I learned something about the mind of a child that afternoon. If you are four or five years old, you probably have to spend a lot of time listening to other people's stories about things, places, and people that you never see. How do you know that those stories are true? Why can't you make up stories and tell them as if you were reporting facts, too, just like everyone else does?

Book Review: 10-20-30 Minutes to Sew

A Fair Trade Book

Title: 10-20-30 Minutes to Sew

        
Author: Nancy Zieman

Author's web site: http://www.nancyzieman.com/blog/

        
Date: 1992

        
Publisher: Oxmoor House

        
ISBN: 0848711181

        
Length: 144 pages including graphics; many full-color photos

        
Quote: “Who uses minutes has hours to use; who loses minutes whole years must lose.”

         
Time-saving tips and simple techniques give those who love to sew time to test the truth of this clever saying. Of course, some of the tips involve buying sewing notions, as it might be from Nancy’s Notions, Ltd...then again, those notions might prove useful. Do you need to see things, not hide them in drawers, yet want them contained in a bin where they won’t fall all over the floor as you lift one thing out? Maybe everyone knows that transparent plastic storage bins are available, now, but did everyone know that in 1992?

        
Tips that don’t involve buying things are pretty predictable too—plan and measure first, keep those scissors sharp, cut multiple layers when possible. However, there are some tips in this book that my grandmother didn’t know, like this valuable information on page 17: “ink marks” (from marking pens) “may reappear many years later...Also, the heat of an iron will set the marks.” Have those new air-soluble pens been around for enough years for anyone to know whether their stains may reappear, too, or is this a problem only with regular felt-tips?

         
Some of the sewing tips are likely to be appreciated by anyone for whom you sew, like a quick trick to curb the tendency of a rounded collar to roll upward. Others may be less appreciated. Don’t bother with that “speedy sport pocket,” and cut those all-in-one side pockets at least twice as deep below the side opening as the diagram suggests, if you want to make a garment for a person who actually uses pockets. (Don’t skip the pockets, either, if you’re sewing for a person like me; I classify anything that doesn’t have good, deep, secure pockets as Pajamas.) Those zippy zipper tricks and wash-out buttonhole patterns, on the other hand, might be perfect shortcuts to garments people can actually enjoy wearing.

        
There’s also a section on making clothing with a serger as “the ultimate time-saver.” Sergers are strange, futuristic machines designed to join fabrics by something more like knitting or crochet than like ordinary straight seams. The results can be decorative; the book shows examples of how lines of contrast-color serging can be used like embroidery. I must confess I’ve never actually seen anyone use a serger, although I’ve seen factory-made garments with serged seams.

        
Special tips are offered for sewing with knitted fabrics and inserting (or replacing) elastic. One super-brilliant trick is to insert one (or more) tucks of elastic into a waistband, so people whose size is subject to change, especially pregnant women, can let in and take out the elastic without your needing to replace it. Another chapter offers special tips that involve extra accessories, special needles and presser-feet that you can snap into the machine for special effects.

        
Information for raw beginners appears, rather awkwardly, after all the tricks for serious hobbyists. How to read a pattern (always save the envelope), how to pin fabric together, how to press seams...it’s true that knowing these things saves a lot of wasted sewing time, but shouldn’t they have been placed at the beginning? Oh, we reviewers always have to find something to gripe about.

        
Since this book is 17 years old, you might wonder about the accuracy of the information that you can order any or all of these gadgets, and/or catalogues of new ones, from Nancy’s Notions at 1-800-833-0690. I did. I dialled. Not only is the store still open, but some poor lady with a flawless U.S. accent was still answering the phone at 8:30 p.m. (I’d been sure I’d get a recording.) When I explained that I’d seen the number in an old book, she quickly offered, “Would you like to order a new book?” The store now exists at Zieman's blog, linked above, as well. Book and store are recommended to all who like to sew.

10-20-30 Minutes to Sew has been out there for a while and is not particularly rare. We can offer it as a Fair Trade Book: $5 for the book + $5 for shipping to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com, we will send $1 to Zieman or a charity of her choice. We also recommend browsing her web site; Zieman has indeed written some new books that you can order directly from her to show respect. 

Adopting U.S. Children

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on February 7, 2014. Image credit: Puravida at Morguefile, http://cdn.morguefile.com/imageData/public/files/p/puravida/preview/fldr_2008_11_11/file000932944015.jpg.)

Yet another post inspired by going back through my old web site...the discussion there of why some overseas adoptions hadn't worked is sort of out of date, after more than a year. No apologies: news stories turn into old news. (And nobody pays me if you read them.) But then an ad displayed on Bubblews prompted me to share a current thought on the same theme.

Middle-aged people who don't have children, or whose children have grown up and left home, often want to adopt children. Why do so many of them complain about this being so hard to do? Possibly because some of them are obsessed with adopting the kind of child who is discussed, often very coldbloodedly, as the commodity called a "White Newborn." 

The supply of White Newborns is limited, such that from time to time, in communities with a lot of low-income White people like mine, people actually advertise encouragement for more young White women to have more babies they can't afford to keep. The ads are always meant to suggest that they were placed by a nice older couple who want to adopt a child themselves. Upon examination these ads may have been placed by a couple, but even if they were, the couple are agents who will be placing the child with some other family, for a profit. The difference between giving a child up to them and selling the child outright is that the needy young mother gets less money from the agents. 

Meanwhile a lot of children in need of foster or adoptive families are languishing in state-run shelters, basically being brought up by social workers, because they're not White Newborns. Seriously: that's considered a heavy stroke against them in the adoption-placement industry. They've lived long enough to have developed personalities...sometimes wonderful personalities. And some people have a problem with that...with being able to get to know a child before you try to be his or her parent. ? ???

Actually, it's easier to adopt a child who you know, and the state can assure others, will fit into your home nicely. The easiest way to make sure adoptive parents and children are compatible is for them to try living together as a foster family first. 

Any social worker who'd allowed me to adopt any child when I was 22 should have lost her or his job...but since I only helped someone else foster the child known to cyberspace as my adoptive sister, it worked out well. Now I have two sisters. They're about the same age (nine or ten years younger than I am) and size (both were bigger than I am at age 11). One's biracial like me, so far as we know; one's triracial. One's cheerful like me; one's depressive. I feel much, much closer to the one who's cheerful...I try to love all of The Nephews impartially, each in his or her own way. 

If you, too, would like to find a congenial child who needs a home, here's the link to a site I saw in a Bubblews ad, investigated, and found informative: www.adoptuskids.org/ . State regulations for foster and adoptive parents vary but this site tries to provide an overview. You don't have to be wealthy. You may or may not need to have a certain level of income, size of house, and/or motor vehicle. You may or may not be required to sit through "classes" or attend counselling sessions. You do need to love children and bond with the child or children you adopt or foster.

Thriftshopping in Big Stone Gap, Virginia

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on July 30, 2013. Image credit: Cheriedurbin at Morguefile: http://cdn.morguefile.com/imageData/public/files/c/cheriedurbin/11/l/1385416194vgww5.jpg)

Fair disclosure: I don't think anyone goes to Big Stone Gap just for the thriftshopping experience. I didn't; I actually went there in order to buy something useful that wasn't even pre-owned (a camera). In the shopping plaza where I bought the useful item was a Goodwill store. I like shopping on behalf of charities, when possible, so I went inside to check for bargains.

Of course, the way charity stores work is that you never know in advance what the store will have. Big cities have huge charity stores where it's possible to be 95% sure that, if you want something commonplace, like a pair of 32x30 blue jeans, you'll probably find it. Smaller towns and stores do not offer even this assurance to the shopper. Maybe they have a plain white medium-size T-shirt without paint stains on it, maybe they don't. If you call and ask whether they have one, someone else might buy it before you get to the store. This is actually what makes thriftshopping addictive. You go into the store with a mental list of things you'd consider buying if the store had them for a certain price. If you want to buy one specific thing and nothing else, you might have to buy it new, at the regular retail price...or not.

The Goodwill store in Big Stone Gap had several racks of clothes. I didn't take the time to look at clothes, since I own plenty. A display of unworn canvas shoes donated by a retail store caught my eye, but since (as usually happens with this kind of thing) all the shoes on the rack were size 10 or larger and I wear a size 7, I didn't spend time in that corner of the store either. I noticed that the store had racks of toys, dishes--lots of coffee mugs, in case anyone out there collects mugs--and miscellaneous household items, but didn't really shop for those either. 

What I look for in thrift stores are books and knitting yarn. The selections change from day to day. Maybe if I'd gone in last week I would have found an armload of interesting books in the Goodwill store. Today the only books that looked remotely interesting were duplicates of books I already own, and the shelves were jammed with paperback romances. For those who think a story about a red-haired girl called Suzie meeting a guy, liking him, quarrelling with him, making up with him, and smiling sweetly at him on the last page is different from a story about a blonde called Sherry meeting a guy, liking him, etc., etc., the Goodwill store in Big Stone Gap is currently the happy hunting ground, but I hunt more elusive bargains.

I did find some yarn. Some acceptable yarn. Maybe in some parts of the country a storekeeper would think there couldn't possibly be a market for twelve ounces of orange acrylic yarn, and would be right. I happen to live near the Tennessee border, where there is a market for anything in U.T. Volunteers orange. Some people in Tennessee will even wear clothes in that shade of orange.

A sign on the front door advertised that a tag sale was going on. Many charity stores use tag sales to keep merchandise moving. If the store uses up a batch of red price tags, then purple, then blue, and so on, then before breaking out another batch of red tags they can put the previous batch of red-tagged items on sale for half price, and get rid of them. The price on the bundle of yarn was acceptable, but yes, it was color-coded for the half-price sale! Hurrah! 

Just before laying the yarn on the checkout counter, I saw a display of back-to-school items. Not being in school, I left plenty of these items for students at Mountain Empire Community College to discover. (The college is across the hill, behind the shopping center.) I do use lots of folders, and what a bargain-hunting thrill to discover lots of brand-new folders spread out on the display. I bought only five dollars' worth of folders. If you use colorful cardboard folders to organize work or school papers, run don't walk.

Will I go back to this store? Not for a while. Some charity stores like to employ the unemployable. One thing that qualifies as making some people unemployable is disrespect for customers. This Goodwill store had unfortunately hired one of the cashiers who need to be told that anything that plops out of their mouths other than "The total price is..." and "Thank you, Sir/Ma'am" amounts to disrespect for customers. Maybe making friendly conversation with a store employee is an invitation, these days, for the employee to blat out rude, vulgar language, so maybe I was at fault for giving the woman an opportunity to chatter...in any case, I don't feel any need to support a charity that is represented by obnoxious employees.Too bad. Goodwill is a legitimate charity and this is, otherwise, a decent little store.

Book Review: A Companion Project Book for Texture with Textiles

Title: A Companion Project Book for Texture with Textiles

        
Author: Linda McGehee

Author's web site: http://www.ghees.com/

        
Date: not shown

        
Publisher: Ghee’s

        
ISBN: 09637160-1-8

        
Length: not numbered

        
Quote: “This project book is designed as an accessory to Texture with Textiles and More Texture with Textiles.”

        
Some of the techniques discussed in this book were explained in those books. Others are explained in other books, such as The Machine Embroidery Handbook. However, you will need special sewing machine accessories to use these technological tricks, whether they’re explained here, or elsewhere, or already familiar to you. (Most of them are familiar to hand embroiderers, which is how it's possible for people to use and resell this book.)

        
Techniques discussed in this book include couching, cording, fringing, pintucking, tape appliqué, ordinary appliqué, cutwork (with buttonhole stitch around the cut-outs), quilt piecing and patching. The book also contains a pattern for an elaborate machine-sewn handbag.

        
Not one of your glamorous full-color craft books, this one is printed in black and white on just one side of each sheet of ordinary printer paper, then spiral-bound at the top. Usually chosen primarily to reduce printing costs, this bookbinding technique does have its uses for craft books; you can make notes and sketches on the back of every page, and photocopying just one or two pages to carry around is easy.

A Companion Project Book to Textures with Textiles is a Fair Trade Book. To buy it here, you send $5 for the book + $5 shipping to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com, and we send $1 to Linda McGehee or a charity of her choice. You pay only one shipping charge for as many books as ship in one package, and this is a slim book. 

Link Log for March 19

Today's Categories: Animals, Crafts, Food, Health, Phenology, Philosophy

Animals 

As this web site has often said...animals that weigh more than 20 or 25 pounds should not roam around without their humans. Not dogs, not horses, not cows, and especially not wolves, bears, coyotes, or elk.

http://myloveofanimalsdogs.blogspot.com/2015/03/dogs-running-at-large-are-dangerous.html

http://www.livewagbark.com/dog-training/teaching-children-how-to-interact-with-dogs/

And, for a change, moose!

http://www.willethfarm.com/2015/03/life-on-farm-new-journey.html

Armed Citizens 

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/19/robber-assaults-84-year-old-man-heads-towards-his-wife-satisfying-video-shows-the-next-moments/?

Books 

How many of these books with confusing titles have you read?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/mar/13/when-books-dont-live-up-to-names

British Royalty 

How could U.S. citizens not like the British royal family better than our own elected officials? The House of Windsor have no authority over our public policy, so there's nothing they could possibly mess up. All they have to do is be good television--which they are. (If they actually had to win elections in this country, I don't think any of them would win anything.)

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/19/obama-to-prince-charles-americans-prefer-the-royals-to-u-s-politicians/?

Crafts 

Shared, with a moment of silence, in memory of our late friend Oogesti's late wife, the lighthouse souvenir lover.

http://jaquo.com/lighthouse-jewelry/

Images of rippling water sort of match images of lighthouses...

http://raintreeearthdesign.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-wonder-of-water-in-design-and-gifts.html

Food 

An online job for foodies...I briefly considered applying for it, then thought it sounded more like sales than like writing or data processing. If you do better with sales through social media, go for it.

http://alovingspoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/A-Loving-Spoon_Intern-Job-Description.pdf

Yet another way/reason to love dandelions...

http://foodrecipesandmore.blogspot.com/2015/01/dandelion-tea.html

Health 

Living with chronic conditions is sort of about health, right?

http://www.lifesuccessfully.com/lupus-love/how-lupus-talked-me-into-a-makeover

Phenology 

In England, the Scarce Tortoiseshell Butterfly...looks a lot like one of the most common butterflies in Virginia; we'll be seeing them any day now. Apparently it looks a lot like a common butterfly in England too, but it's a separate species, and scarce.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/19/rare-scarce-tortoiseshell-continental-butterfly-survives-uk-winter-first-time

From Canada...

http://everythingsusanandmore.blogspot.com/2015/03/kawagama-lake-in-march-on-wordless.html

Philosophy 

Couldn't agree more with +Theresa Wiza :

http://philosophicalmusingsandinsights.blogspot.com/2015/03/why-doesnt-somebody-do-something-about.html

Link Log for March 18

Just one link all day:

True Green 

From the grandson of the designer of one of the most efficient refrigerators in history, here's an article about why the Energy Star is not the only thing to rely on when you're in the market for an energy-efficient refrigerator. (Showing that government is not the only thing to rely on if we want manufacturers to build better refrigerators, either. Government owes industry money, and tends to be open to the kind of negotiations that won't even start if a critical mass of customers let industry know that we want refrigerators that cost us less money.)

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/choosing-energy-efficient-refrigerator

Why so few links? Because I spent the whole day writing three articles for paying clients. More links tomorrow.

Drivers: Be Prepared

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on October 7, 2014; updated. Topic credit: Leni wrote http://www.bubblews.com/news/8585053-too-many-car-accidents-today . Image credit: Jusben at Morguefile, http://cdn.morguefile.com/imageData/public/files/j/jusben/preview/fldr_2010_04_25/file9211272199234.jpg.)

This morning I looked back through a printout of some private journal entries I'd planned to publish on Associated Content in 2009.

Around Christmas of that year, a snowstorm wiped out electrical power in most of Scott County, Virginia, for about two weeks. Regular readers may remember that I posted an article about walking to Kingsport, Tennessee, where the lights never blinked, and spending time with a relative who had the Internet at home.

What I didn't post, although I noted it at the time and meant to post it, was that during the night before I walked to Kingsport, four residents of Scott County had died trying to drive to Kingsport. Through the falling snow. Around the fallen trees and power lines. They didn't think they could get through even one night without electricity. They didn't think they could walk ten, or maybe twenty, miles in the snow. And evidently they really couldn't do what they tried to do as an alternative.

That morning, I walked past a few of the cars out of which those people, and others who weren't killed, had been lifted by emergency rescue services. Not to mention some cars whose drivers had just sensibly decided to pull over, park the cars, and walk home before they were injured.

This winter's weather disabled hundreds of vehicles but it's pleasant to read that apparently most of the drivers got out in time. The Kingsport Times-News web site, when searched for "traffic death," pulled up an article from mid-February in which someone had reported 901 wrecked or abandoned vehicles but no fatalities. It's possible that the original version of this post, along with a few hundred others, helped encourage drivers to avoid driving in bad conditions, even parking beside the road and walking home, whenever they can.

Recently I was in a car with a relative who spent several years car-free in the city and is readjusting to being a driver. Why do people have to be so rude and not dim their lights when they meet other cars on the road at night, he said angrily. I agree that this behavior is rude and obnoxious and hateful and a source of pain and danger, but I've also noticed that many of those who increasingly indulge in it are older drivers who don't like to admit that they can't see to steer by their dimmer lights any more.

The majority of people in these United States were born between 1940 and 1970; the majority of that demographic were born between 1945 and 1955. This means that a lot of Americans' eyes are aging. Some of us are needing more light to see where we are going, some of us are feeling more pain when we see bright lights in the dark, and those who are close to becoming "legally blind" from cataracts are suffering from both of these conditions. This means that we need to make a demographic shift from being a car-dependent culture to either a car-free or a chauffeur-employing culture. I don't see that shift happening yet, but it needs to happen. The incidence of motor vehicle accidents in the news lately is getting surreal in my part of the world.

Personally, being car-free, I fantasize about closing roads for a year after any kind of collision has occurred, taxing cars per mile driven, all sorts of schemes to pressure people to drive less. I also know that those schemes, like all schemes to push people to do things they don't want to do, would do at least as much harm as good. Americans need to sell the idea of driving less, not try to bully people into it.

But those of us who want to be alive next year do need to think about how we're going to get through this year's road hazards.

If you drive, do the obvious things. Plan to spend more time driving slowly and cautiously in rain or snow. Prune dead trees. Keep your brakes in good condition. Get your tires retreaded if they're worn. Have tire chains, even if you don't drive in snow, just in case you get caught in it.

And, if your eyes are aging, break your addiction to driving. Please. For your sake as well as everyone else's. Ride the bus. Hire taxis. Pay a friend or relative to drive for you.

If you can't see the road when you hit the dimmer switch, that's probably a sign that you need to stop driving.

Book Review: Buttons to Wear

Title: Buttons to Wear

        
Author: Jean Kievlan

Author's blog: http://www.justcraftyme.com/

        
Date: 1991

        
Publisher: Design Originals by Suzanne McNeil

        
ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon

        
Length: 12 pages

        
Quote: “Buttons to wear as earrings or button covers...we can wear a visible symbol of our talents wherever we go.”

        
This mini-book explains how to put buttons together using simple precut wooden shapes and plastic covers. These are glued together and decorated with fine-tip markers and other trimmings, acrylic paint, ribbon, doll hair, and so on. It’s a simple craft that requires more patience with itsy-bitsy materials than anything else. The buttons can be used to fasten jackets or worn as accessories.

        
Some of these buttons come in matched sets, and some in related sets; you could button a sweater with five little “book” shapes, or you could use a square cookie-sheet design, a round fruit-bowl design, a book shape marked “cooking,” a heart marked “I ♥ cooking,” and a round button with a hairnet around a cook’s face, if you succeed in painting all five designs to suit your requirements.  Some of the buttons match. Anyway, the booklet contains instructions for what are shown as 19 sets of one-inch buttons and 11 two-to-three-inch lapel-type buttons.

Buttons to Wear is a Fair Trade Book. To buy it online, send $5 for the book + $5 for shipping to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com, and we will send 10% of that price, or $1, to Jean Kievlan or a charity of her choice. You pay only one shipping price for as many books (or other things) as can be shipped in one package, so feel free to throw in a few books by deceased authors (or by corporations) when ordering this thin book.

Busting Bubblews

Gentle Readers, there's actually a web site dedicated to busting Bubblews:

http://burstbubblews.blogspot.com/

I'm adding it to my Google feed. If you're a Bubbler, or are interested in law and public policy and/or ethics and/or international relations, I recommend that you add it too. Quite informative.

In communication with the Federal Trade Commission, please mention complaint #59993228.

(Even if they assign a separate number to your separate complaint...which I hope they do, actually. Numbers are important. The FTC need to see lots of numbers so they can appreciate the need to mandate that, under federal law, if a U.S.-based company has a web site that displays an amount of money the company is supposed to send any person, that company has a maximum of 24 hours to send that payment, in full, before the FTC shuts down their web site and imposes a fine on them. Arvind and Jason thought it was very clever to have a computer automatically promise payments... and the rest of us thought that letting a computer publicly promise payments that the company didn't have and didn't intend to make would have been covered by existing laws about fraudulent advertising.)

Learning to Write

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on June 5, 2014. Thanks to Realityspeaks for suggesting this topic:www.bubblews.com/news/3649884-did-your-teachers-like-your-handwriting-when-you-were-in-school . Thanks to Gurtop at Morguefile for the image: http://mrg.bz/LUlwUC . You can tell it's not mine because we used only English at my primary school.)

In 1971, after two relatives who lived in the same house in Florida had different major surgical operations, my mother decided to pack up her children and go to Florida for the winter. Although we were there for several months, Florida didn't really require visitors' children to go to school, especially when the visitors thought it might be more educational for the visitors' children to spend lots of time with their post-op grandmothers.

This was the grandmother who had been declared dead in 1935, but had been very active in jobs and adventures and even 1960s movements as long as she had one good leg. She still had quite a lot of energy left. What she needed was an outlet...like giving her granddaughter the kind of education a young lady would have needed in, perhaps, 1921. She still had little white dresses with frills on them that my mother and aunt had worn, but not worn out, when they were in primary school in the 1930s, and during the next year, when she lived with us, I wore them. She thought a six-year-old girl ought to be at least basting, hemming, and sewing on buttons to help her mother make clothes at home. Reading? Why not the best Book of all, the Bible? She would call up her friends and have me read the Bible to them on the phone. We didn't do much math because Grandmother didn't like math either. But how ridiculous that my school hadn't started us writing cursive yet. Schools had deteriorated in these degenerate days but surely the teachers would be impressed when I came back from Florida writing nice, neat cursive script just like Mother. 

In fact Mother's cursive writing models looked a lot like the ones on the walls of my second grade classroom. However, when I got back to school my first grade teacher was not impressed at all. In her opinion what "gifted" children most needed to learn was to sit back and wait for everyone else to catch up. No encouragement to do anything ahead of my official grade level would ever come from her. (I didn't like her. I didn't like school.)

In second grade we were finally allowed to write cursive...but only during the second term and only after everybody had spent at least one day making each letter, first lower-case and then upper-case, exactly the way "Mrs. Ratfink" did. Writing letters Mrs. Ratfink hadn't taught us how to write was wrong. The way Mother wrote was wrong. I needed to re-learn everything, even the way I wrote a lower-case "e." You might have been thinking that there is no controversy about the way to write a lower-case cursive "e." You might have been wrong. According to Mrs. Ratfink, Mother hadn't taught me to put a long enough flourish on the end, and this made my lower-case e's all wrong. Barely even readable.

The best part of that endless school year was getting to spend three weeks in quarantine with mumps. I hated Mrs. Ratfink. And her school. And the fuss Grandmother made about my not being allowed to skip straight into grade three. By comparison with those things I positively liked mumps.

During the rest of my elementary school years I made a special study of the way my various teachers wrote. I became a handwriting imitator. After elementary school I've hardly ever written anything in cursive...though in high school I dabbled in calligraphy. 

Mrs. Ratfink left our school a few years later, on maternity leave, and never came back. I was glad my brother didn't have to put up with her stupidity and hoped she'd found a job better suited to her intelligence, such as dishwashing. Only recently I heard that she'd been hired as a teacher, kept until she achieved tenure, and finally retired with honors, at a school even smaller and poorer than ours...and as far as I'm concerned this fully explains why that school consistently fails to overachieve in any way comparable to ours.
As John Holt observed, the micromanaging "any way I haven't taught you is wrong" sort of personality might be acceptable for tap dance instructors, or perhaps prison guards, but it does not belong in any school where it might come into contact with children.

Book Review: Champagne Melodies

Title: Champagne Melodies

        
Author: Optigan corporate employees

        
Date: 1973

        
Publisher: Warner Bros. Inc.

        
ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon

        
Length: 48 pages of sheet music

        
Quote: “We have recommended certain program discs and special effects for each song, but these are by no means the only choices.”     

The Optigan was an early electronic keyboard. It played generic rhythm chords, in the keys determined by your selection from 21 chord buttons, while you picked out the melody with one finger and sang along.

        
If you play an instrument other than keyboard, this method of notation will make it easy for you to use whatever harmonies and rhythms work for you, while picking out any of these fifteen early-twentieth-century songs: “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “April Showers,” “Baby Face,” “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” “Liza,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” “Oh You Beautiful Doll,” “Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” or “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart.”

        
If you play piano (electronic or otherwise) with two hands, you should also be able to use this book easily. If you play a different kind of electronic keyboard, however, you’ll probably have to make some substitutions, since the Optigan had diminished chords rather than seventh chords.

Prices for this book have gone up, not down, since its publication. To buy it here, send salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com $10 + $5 for shipping. You pay only one shipping charge per package, so we recommend buying this book along with a Fair Trade Book or handcraft item. 

Phenology: Spring Birds Return

On the way to the computer center I saw two robins, an oriole...and a mockingbird.

Forget about identifying birds by their songs if you've seen a mockingbird. Mimus polyglottos are too clever. They actually seem to enjoy making other birds, and humans, look. I believe they have a sense of humor, but no sense of when they're being tiresome. During a periodical cicada year I've seen a mockingbird perch beside other songbirds and make a noise like a cicada; my mother used to know one that liked to imitate a mildly demented patient's cell phone and watch through the window as the humans bustled about the house, looking for the phone. And one year, possibly guessing that he was being timed and trying to beat his own record, a mockingbird who lived near me in Maryland went through a repertoire of all the bird songs he might have heard in the neighborhood, some he might have heard during his winter vacations in Florida, and a few he might have made up on his own, that lasted for more than two minutes without a break.

Temperatures have been in the fifties and sixties. The water table is still high; lots of temporary ponds have formed wherever there's a dent in a hillside, and all of them, so far as I can tell, are full of spring peepers, all of whom are celebrating the March Thaw enthusiastically.

Link Log for March 17

Today's Categories: Animals, Charity, Crafts, Economic Indicator, Education, Irish Things, Old News, Philosophy, Scams, Technology, Travel, Welfare State. (Should "Welfare State" be classified under "Scams"?)

Animals 

A dog's life in Russia...

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/113817956804/asylum-art-two-siberian-huskies-on-a-frozen-lake

Animals get bored when they have to spend all their time in human homes. Sometimes they misbehave just because they're bored. Of course, animals who have to spend all their time in the yard can get bored too...dogs and cats (and some chickens and some other birds) make good pets because many of them find their humans interesting. They're less bored, and less naughty, when they can follow us around and interact with us, at least part of each day.

http://myloveofanimalsdogs.blogspot.com/2015/03/bad-dog-or-bored.html

Years ago, I posted an article on AC about doing needlework with the surplus fur dogs and cats start to shed at this time of year, steering readers to the book Knitting with Dog Hair. Some people at AC hated it; they confused the idea of combing and trimming an animal's coat, which many living dogs and cats like to have us do, with the idea of killing an animal to steal its skin and fur and all, which of course this web site recommends only in the case of bears. But, seriously...even short-haired animals are about to release masses of surplus hairs in the next few weeks. Most of that hair will end up in landfills, or clogging lint traps. Animals who've bonded with humans, however, actually like to scent-mark their humans and are delighted when their humans knit, weave, or embroider a bit of their fur into a garment. (Just a bit, in a winter garment. Dog and cat hair makes super-warm yarn.)

http://www.dogpawsitivetidbits.com/2015/03/slicker-brush-grooming-long-haired-dogs.html

Charity 

Another child with cancer seeks help...

http://www.gofundme.com/HelpDanika

Crafts 

Jil Eaton is raffling off a cute learn-to-knit package...

http://jileaton.blogspot.com/2015/03/new-giveaway.html

Economic Indicator 

The U.S. economy may be down, but Americans can still think of bizarre ways to spend surplus money...

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/113819293734/wetheurban-design-orphe-led-smart-shoes-meet-the

Education 

Academic standards can certainly be set higher than Common Core's...but is that what Arne Duncan had in mind?

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/16/arne-duncan-insists-high-standards-dont-have-to-be-common-core/?

Drug education...tends to leave out drug-freedom. Although alcohol and marijuana weren't allowed in our home, I grew up watching my father smoke tobacco, yes. And watching him try to quit every few years. And watching my big, strong, tough Drill Sergeant Dad develop emphysema and seem "older" at fifty than some of his smoke-free aunts and uncles were at eighty. I think the effect was like watching school friends become welfare mothers, or watching my best college friend use LSD. I think being 100% drug-free is something to celebrate and sing, whether you've ever been addicted or not.

http://helpforsingleparents.blogspot.com/2015/03/which-is-better-tobacco-alcohol-or.html

Social education...

http://everythingsusanandmore.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-bully-and-quick-thinking.html

Irish Things 

Cute story...

http://almostiowa.com/2015/03/15/poitin-irish-moonshine-2/

Corned beef and cabbage? Bacon and cabbage? Potatoes and cabbage? Just plain cabbage? Any of these could be considered Irish.

http://everythingsusanandmore.blogspot.com/2013/02/bacon-and-cabbage-recipe.html

Do you believe in magic? Leprechauns and fairies and boggarts and suchlike? I believe most things ascribed to such causes have always had natural explanations, not always understood or understandable. We can't prove that nothing is magical (or miraculous or paranormal) but I'm one of the people who always look for the natural, logical explanation. What party-poopers we are.

http://challengeyourwriting.blogspot.com/2015/03/magic-do-you-believe.html

Thanks to Allen West for sharing this, even though it opened an obnoxious pop-up ad (I didn't really read it--I let the swat-that-fly reflex take over--but it featured a word that rhymes with "Niagara").

http://louderwithcrowder.com/the-real-st-patrick/

Old News 

This web site discussed long ago the fact, reported to me in the early 1990s, that some people's reactions to artificially sweetened "diet" foods and drinks may cause them to gain weight rather than lose weight. What Liz Klimas is reporting here is a more recent study suggesting that people who don't immediately recognize themselves in this category may gradually move into it over the years...because, on average, regular drinkers of diet soda seem to be fatter than those who drink sugary soda or fruit juice. (Apologies: The Blaze works a little better for me than similar ad-cluttered sites, I think because I get it through a Google feed rather than through Yahoo e-mail; depending on which browser you use, you may want to avoid Blaze links. This web site promises never to hide a Blaze link. If you have computer problems with this site, you will be able to recognize Blaze links and not click on them.)

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/17/diet-soda-might-not-be-good-for-your-waistline-after-all/?

Philosophy 

Interesting thoughts, anyway...

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/113872135391/two-wrongs-dont-make-a-right-you-need-way-more

Scams 

"Content farms" that pay writers are one thing...here's a short list of "content farms" that steal content that's been published elsewhere.

http://www.writingcreatively.org/2015/03/writers-this-site-is-stealing-your-work.html

Technology 

Renting a car? Demand that it be 100% camera-free.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/16/hertz-is-putting-cameras-in-its-cars-cameras-watching-the-driver-not-the-road/?

Cool model gadget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNDPLF1hxAc

Travel 

Good luck finding a decent laundromat these days...

http://pacific-nw-travels-and-tails.blogspot.com/2015/03/rv-laundry-woes.html

Welfare State 

Seems the U.S. Social Security Administration is taking a tip from a well-established traditional scam in India: If money is due to a certain person, but you don't want to send it or don't want someone else to send it, simply file a report that the person is dead. One more reason why I'm not waiting for any Social Security pension. (Though frankly I'm amazed that the system didn't collapse thirty years ago.)

https://theresawiza.wordpress.com/2015/03/16/are-you-dead-and-not-aware-of-your-passing/

Her First Time Out

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on May 13, 2014. Photo is mine.)

This is one of Heather's and Irene's combined family of kittens. Probably Heather's, going by the tortoiseshell coloring and long tail. 

I had to consult my names database, compiled from various dictionaries and other books, to find Thai or at least Asian names for the Siamese-crossbreed kittens. This one's peculiar face and personality reminded me of her great-grand-aunt Mogwai, so Gwai, a Chinese word that seems to translate all the senses in which Americans use "weird," seemed like a good name for her. It's not her official name; she's not answering to it. 

Someone out there is sure to ask, "How will such a funny-looking mixed-breed kitten ever find a home?" The answer is of course that she already has a permanent home. If she hadn't had one, she wouldn't be here; her mother would have been spayed. 

Anyway, here she is, exploring the last remaining white violets in the not-a-lawn. (I encourage just about anything that will grow on this steep slope.) If she looks as if she's finding the world of fresh air and sunshine everything from "exotic and fascinating" to "spooky and sinister," that's probably because she is...she's spent the whole month or so she's been alive, except for a few minutes yesterday afternoon, in a dark corner inside the house.

(Update: Gwai always was a "strange and spooky" kitten. In adolescence she made it plain that, although part of her quirkiness was just her personality, another part was that she didn't like me. So she moved out. Apparently she wasn't a satisfactory replacement for the late lamented Khon and Bucky, either. I don't know what's become of her by now.)

Link Log for March 16

Today's Categories: Animals, Electronic Stuff, Football, Health, History

Animals 

More border collies, plus an online guide to a walking tour of Seattle...should this go under "travel" instead of "animals"?

http://border-collies-in-the-burbs.blogspot.com/2015/03/hiking-around-seattle-cheshiahud-trail.html

Electronic Stuff 

I don't think Yahoo is seriously trying to help people who keep forgetting their passwords. Why not? Because Yahoo's trying to force its "phone verification" system on people who've never once forgotten their Yahoo e-mail passwords. (I've mistyped mine--rather often when it's been the "strong" kind, with random characters, that Yahoo recommends--but never reset one because I'd forgotten it. Yahoo keeps badgering me to add a cell phone number to each e-mail account, just the same.) What Yahoo is trying to do is cash in on a few leaks that allow sales pests to get their nasty little hands on a lot of people's cell phone numbers. If you can afford to buy a cell phone you don't actually use, maybe the five-dollar kind that you load with prepaid minutes, and load it with the minimal number of minutes and then turn it off permanently, and feed that number into the Internet, then you can afford to add a phone number to your profile on a web site. If you can't afford that luxury, this web site recommends never, under any circumstances, using any phone number that you currently use on any web site whatsoever.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/16/cant-remember-your-online-passwords-yahoo-just-took-the-first-step-to-eliminating-them/?

Football 

Apologies: this Blaze page contains annoying ads--well below their usual level of annoyingness.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/16/some-huge-news-for-tim-tebow-fans-as-the-former-qb-reportedly-works-out-for-nfl-team/?

Health 

+Theresa Wiza shares what she's learned about asthma:

http://helpforsingleparents.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-to-prevent-colds-from-becoming.html

My own, but it might help somebody out there...I only regret that a blog post can't be more specific.

http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2015/03/priscilla-king-on-painkiller-addiction.html

History 

Brent Parrish remembers M. Stanton Evans, and his Law of Inadequate Paranoia, in a piece that's, well, much more than the usual obituary...

http://noisyroom.net/blog/2015/03/16/the-silencers/

Politics 

Reminding Republicans to think beyond their box...

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/113792594349/prettiestpotato-republicans

Morgan Griffith Announces High School Art Competition

More from Congressman Morgan Griffith's E-Newsletter:

"2015 Congressional Art Competition

High school students (grades 9 – 12) residing in the Ninth Congressional District are again invited to participate in the Congressional Art Competition, which began in 1982.  The chosen theme for this year is “Famous Folks, Towns, and Beauty in Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District.”  I encourage students to put some thought into their work and be creative when designing their original pieces.

The winning artwork will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol complex for a year.  The student will also be invited to Washington to celebrate the unveiling of his/her work.  In addition, the second and third place selections will be on display in our offices.

Participating students are asked to submit a photograph of their original artwork to either the Christiansburg or Abingdon office by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1st.  For specific guidelines, please contact Elliott Silverman at Elliott.Silverman@mail.house.gov.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671.  To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. "