Monday, May 2, 2016

May 2 Link Log

There wasn't time for a Link Log on Friday; peddling the Portal Paper and writing this 1490-word monster of a post...

http://blogjob.com/priscillaking/2016/04/29/what-makes-a-great-blog/

...left little time for surfing. So today there are lots of links to sort out as fast as possible, via e-mail, Google +, and Twitter. Categories here: Animals, Art, Boycott at Work, Christian, Crowding Creates Craziness, Education, Etiquette, Food (Yum), Frugal, Green, Health. Categories at Blogjob: History, Local Link, Money, Nature, Phenology, Politics, Psychology, Travel/Vacations, Weekends, Women, Writing/Zazzle;

http://blogjob.com/priscillaking/2016/05/02/may-2-link-log/

Animals

Cruelty to animals...and humans...in Australia.

https://twitter.com/Drudge_Report_/status/726949241898307584

Art 

 Art needs the inspiration of science. Scientists need the inspiration of art. Y'know what I don't like about a lot of the visual art I see (and, when I was buying toys for The Nephews, a lot of the toys and games on the market) is a lack of scientific information. If it's supposed to look like a bird, cat, butterfly, I want the eyes, colors, or wing shapes to look right; an image of (or story about) a moth with human-type eyes seems either stupid or creepy to me.

http://www.dailygood.org/story/1277/a-university-art-and-science-fusion-program-richard-whittaker/

Boycott at Work

Target can so easily save this. Don't cave to haters--on either side. Single-user bath and fitting rooms.

http://freedomoutpost.com/target-stocks-sink-by-2-5-billion-in-10-days-as-over-1-million-americans-pledge-to-boycott-them/

Christian 

 Rocker Bono, a left-wing Christian, shares his testimony:

https://todaysfreshmanna.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/bono-interview-grace-over-karma/

Crowding Creates Craziness

Comment from the +Allen West Republic was, "In Chicago you don't have the right to defend yourself, much less someone else." Much as some Southerners might like to file this story under "things Yankees do," similar callousness is reported from Southern and Western cities too...and in ancient Judea, in the story of the Good Samaritan. Bottom line: when people are crowded together and are hurrying to get through the crowd and have been encouraged to rely on some official person to resolve problems, you could die--from a violent attack, a heat stroke, whatever--before anyone would stop and look at your fallen body.

http://wgntv.com/2016/04/29/woman-attacked-while-riding-blue-line-suspects-sought/

Education 

 "Predatory institutional activity." Hmm.

My mother took a correspondence course toward an "External Degree" from a church-sponsored college. (That the school in question publicizes itself as a Christian school with Christian content in each course is relevant here.) She paid for the courses she took; she didn't go to the campus and take the on-campus mini-course to complete the degree; she was too busy doing the job she had. All was well for ten or fifteen years, and then the school--which had by then hired an old classmate, never a friend, of mine as its lawyer-in-charge-of-collection-suits!--started sending more bills for the tuition Mother had paid "plus collection expenses." By that time Mother had another job but was somewhat incapacitated by an injury.

Mother asked me to find a Maryland lawyer. The first one I called was delighted to take the case, free of charge, chortling "I'm required to take a few 'pro bono' cases each year, and this'll be a slam-dunk." We went to a special branch courtroom in Silver Spring, set up just for this kind of situation, to save everyone the trouble of going out to Rockville, Maryland. My old school acquaintance, a church member, stood up and admitted to having shamelessly harassed an old lady with a limp (however temporary) with double bills for a debt that the statute of limitations forbade collecting, even if it hadn't been paid long ago, which it had. We collected over $1000 for the inconvenience to Mother, went back to Hyattsville, ate lunch at a nice buffet restaurant and double-tipped the kid who brought us ice water just to celebrate.

And meanwhile, because other "External Degree" students who were busier, older, and/or sicker than Mother had not come to Maryland to stand up for their rights, the same judge allowed the same shyster lawyer to raise probably at least $5000 for the school. In Maryland, at least, if you're summoned to court on a ridiculous charge and don't go to court, it's considered an admission of guilt...so although at least ten other people had probably paid their tuition too, years ago, and could have financed tours of Washington by going in to collect damages, the judge allowed the school to continue collecting double payments from them.

There are, and I love the way John Gresham has highlighted this in novels, far too many lawyers looking for ways to fund their practice in Maryland (and in major U.S. cities generally). Ashley Nicole Baker doesn't say whether this is the kind of thing the federal Department of Education is stepping in to "police," but if it is, I must say the universities that engage in this kind of elder abuse have brought on themselves what they get.

 http://www.freedomworks.org/content/department-education-policing-universities-student-aid-enforcement-unit

Etiquette

Miss Manners says, "Tsk! Tsk!"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2016/05/01/nerdy-fight-breaks-out-at-whcd-afterparty-between-fox-news-and-huffington-post-reporters/?postshare=1761462107154965&tid=ss_tw



 Food (Yum) 

 McDougall recipes, including one for asparagus:

https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2016nl/apr/recipes.htm

Fun with potatoes...vegan or not, your choice:

http://hubpages.com/food/Homemade-Potato-Hash-Browns-or-Home-fries-recipe

The classic comfort food:

http://hubpages.com/food/basic-homemade-chicken-soup

 Frugal

What happened to "Extreme Couponing"?

http://blogjob.com/groceryshoppingwithcoupons/2016/05/01/confessions-of-an-extreme-coupon-user/

Green 

 Thanks to the Tweeps who shared this link to a German study they say documents the persistence of glyphosate in urine. I'm really over my head in German here. The last time I tried to read a German web site, I mistranslated "train of blogs" as "travel blogs"! Can someone find/translate the specific study?

http://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/neue-uba-untersuchung-zu-glyphosate

Health 

 Isaac Morehouse shares a graph showing exactly how much worse--less efficient, more expensive--government intervention has made medical care:

http://isaacmorehouse.com/2016/04/30/every-industry-gets-worse-when-government-gets-involved/
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May 2 Link Log

(Retrieved from Blogjob with the tags: C.S. Lewis book Mere Christianity, custom postcard, Zazzle store.)

It's been another link-laden day, generating another two-part Link Log. Categories at https://priscillaking.blogspot.com : Animals, Art, Boycott at Work, Christian, Crowding Creates Craziness, Education, Etiquette, Food (Yum), Frugal, Green, Health. Categories here: History, Local Link, Money, Nature, Phenology, Politics, Psychology, Travel/Vacations, Weekends, Women, Writing/Zazzle, with a huge hat tip/wave/salute to +Barbara Radisavljevic .
History 
There are things to admire about Alexander Hamilton; unfortunately, they don't include his politics. Tom Woods shared a temporary link; there's a longer mini-biography on Wikipedia.
Local Link
This hardware dealer snarkily refused to advertise in the Portal Paper because he's doing well on Facebook. I haaate Facebook, the way they encourage individuals to post their real names online and the way they don't even display a page without an annoying Captcha, so I would never have discovered his business there...but this is how to work Facebook. (Note that a U.S.-based search engine, which I've always used in English, pulled up his Facebook page in French--it doesn't matter much, since the user content on the page is still in English, but it does show what a captious, annoying site Facebook is.) This link is posted by way of "heaping coals of fire upon his head." (He does offer what can no longer be called "the Wal-Mart Price," the price Sam Walton would have used, on small, odd bits of hardware.)
Money
Scotland adds the faces of two obscure women writers (that I, for one, now want to read) to its new forms of "filthy lucre" but, as in the U.S., that's not the only controversial novelty about the change in the "new" money...
Thanks to Jason Pye for e-mailing the link to Christopher Ingraham's excellent, thorough write-up on an issue whose time has come. Some correspondents blamed State Senator Carrico, winter before last, for backing off a state-level bill in order to wait and see what a federal law would say about "asset forfeiture." I think this article will show them how and why "asset forfeiture" needed to be considered a federal issue.
Nature
If you can open a big beautiful picture, check out...
Phenology
Gardening in Alabama:
This California blogger is participating in a one-day blog challenge to post about "smells." It's not a full-length post, but yes, as I walked through town to the computer center this morning...in between whiffs of motor vehicle exhaust, mostly from people who think they "have to" drive a mile or two just to show that they don't "have to" walk, I did manage to get one heavenly whiff of the scent of iris blossoms. (Usually I walk down a side street where the sidewalk is about three feet below people's hedges, and sniff those people's iris blossoms close up. And I enjoy my own flowers at home.)
Politics
Are the "official" reports of political news...biased? (Thanks to the +Allen West Republic for sharing.)
The town of Logan, West Virginia, tells it like it is:
Will Congress please just enact this into law and get it done?
Fiscal conservatives blame "moderate" Republicans in Congress for not tightening the budget:
Psychology 
This is a nice well-written article; nevertheless...I have some reservations. I tend to agree more with C.S. Lewis. If you want to detach from an emotional feeling like happiness, you sit down and analyze it: "Am I happy yet? Could I be happier?" If you want to be able to look back on a time in your life, long or short, and say, "Yes, I was happy while I was doing that, and I'm happy about having done it; I wouldn't have it any other way," you focus on doing the right thing. Let the happiness take care of itself. Fix facts first; feelings follow. If you forget about making "more happiness" a goal while you're doing them, the strategies Kira Newman suggests are likely to lead to doing the right thing and being glad you did. Note particularly the balance: first do four things alone, then, for number five, connect with another person. (Active unhappiness is often caused by a lack of solitude.)
Dermot Barry considers the multitude of factors that make it silly to try to analyze a correlation between something that's complex in the real world, like "parenthood," and some other thing that's complex in the real world, like "happiness"..."scientifically," yet. And he doesn't even mention factors like the physical damage "parenthood," specifically motherhood, does to some women who love their children but are injured by pregnancy and/or birth.
Have you ever had a dream that not only seemed to be trying to turn into a novel, but did...turn into a novel-length drama, while you were still in the dream? I never have. This one is fascinating.
Travel 
Good general advice for travel, with the writer's homeland specifically in mind.
Weekend Tips 
Tired? If so, you didn't make use of this guidance to weekends:
Women
Fat is not good. Big, solid muscles ("for a lady") and bones are good.
Writing 
Attention correspondents: I'm not the only one who's noticed this. We may be able to read 10,000 words in an hour, but the Internet does not allow this. Not any more. If you're one of the half-dozen or dozen bloggers any of your e-friends is able to read in any given hour of an eight-hour day, you're among a Chosen Few.
+Barbara Radisavljevic says Zazzle is launching an Affiliate Program too, like Amazon. Great if it works!
(While clicking through the pages she recommended, I seem to have designed a T-shirt. Cool, if anybody wants a T-shirt! I wanted to post images of my knits! Zazzle doesn't like the pictures my cell phone camera takes. Boo, hoo, waaaa! Anyway, they're good T-shirts, huge range of sizes, prices, colors, styles, basic large size will cost you $20 from which I'll get $2.)
Somehow I expect that if I earn money on Zazzle it'll be by promoting the beautiful photos e-friends have displayed there. Like this one:
Or this one...if it works!
Santa Barbara Mission, California
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Book Review: Jeane Dixon's Astrological Cookbook

(Blogjob tags: cookbook, cookbook that makes cooks laugh out loud, experiment with herbs, food and astrology, newspaper horoscope column, variety of plant-based foods.)

Title: Jeane Dixon’s Astrological Cookbook
Author: Jeane Dixon
Date: 1976
Publisher: William Morrow & Company
ISBN: 0-688-03091-2
Length: 233 pages
This book starts out just the way skeptics feared, with a list of “astrological foods for each decan,” and during some “decans” some signs aren't assigned much to eat. Dixon’s system recognizes Neptune and Uranus as possible “governing bodies,” but assigns only “pine nuts, lavender” to Neptune and no foods to Uranus (insert “Uranus” joke of choice here).
Fortunately, Dixon goes on to recommend a balanced, plant-based diet with less meat and more interesting vegetables than many Americans were eating in 1976, more like the food pyramid recommended by dietitians today. Some recipes come out a bit on the granola side, and some are pretty basic—the first recipe in the book explains how to stir a quarter-teaspoon of basil into canned tomato soup and garnish with yogurt, or sour cream. Most will be delicious if you have garden-fresh vegetables.
Astrological introductions to “your” birthday menu can be as hilarious as reading your daily horoscope, in the newspaper, at the end of the day. I was surprised to learn that I “have a passion for haute cuisine,” and “Everything...must be expertly prepared, elegantly served.” (I often work until my stomach growls and reluctantly, leaving my mind at the job, go and warm some beans in the tin.) It was also a surprise that I “pay as much attention to an artistically set table...as...the food itself,” since my idea of “an artistically set table” is a table with the morning mail and newspapers cleared away and the seasonings set back in the middle. After that, it wasn’t much of a surprise that my list of special birthday treat foods begins with wheat, which my body doesn’t digest at all.
Friends who live in Maryland and spend as much time on the water as possible don’t get Dixon’s insight, “[Y]ou love to live and work near the water...fish is paramount in your diet.” Friends who’ve spent most of their lives in landlocked areas get that. Well...the fish recipes are decent, anyway.
If you’re skeptical about astrology, I doubt very much that Jeane Dixon’s Astrological Cookbook will cause you to start taking astrology seriously. But it might inspire you to try cooking a wider variety of plant-based foods, “seasoning” the dull canned vegetables with a fresh herb rather than with fat or meat, and serving herb tea instead of coffee, wine, or soda pop, if you've not been doing those things before.
For almost all of us, this book can be very helpful. The astrology is a hoot. Laughing about the disparities between what Dixon predicts you’ll like, and what you actually like, will probably be good for your digestion.
Jeane Dixon no longer needs $1, and the minimum price here is still $5 per copy + $5 per package for shipping, + $1 for online payment. You may find better prices for this book elsewhere. However, if you buy it here, you can add two or three other books (which might be Fair Trade Books) to the package, thus supporting a living writer and making the price for the total purchase much more competitive.
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Olive Garden Replied...with Pretty Pictures

What does Darden, the company that runs Olive Garden and a few other upscale restaurants, have to say in response to Dave Murphy's provocative petitions? Olive Garden replied, promptly, with pretty pictures. This reply contains some more pretty pictures.

https://www.darden.com/citizenship?sf25494583=1

Reducing water waste is an excellent goal, but, er, um...my concern is about keeping the antibiotics off my plate. Which means more farmers raising fewer chickens per farm with less cruelty...less waste...more, y'know, all-around Greenness.

For the Morguefile pictures below, I apologize; Morguefile.com has changed their site so that I couldn't find the links and credits I wanted to use with these free public-domain photos.



(And more farmers distributing smaller numbers of healthier eggs also means a lower consumer price per egg.)

This guy, I'd eat.


These poor creatures...actually these birds look as if they have more than a week or two to live, so they're probably packed in like that only for a few hours in transit, but "factory farms" are places where hens spend their entire lives like this. (Morguefile favors pretty pictures. Real live pictures of factory-farm fowl aren't nearly so pretty.) Call'em salmonella on the wing, and likewise MRSA and E. coli and anything else you can think of. They breathe--though not for one-tenth as long as nature intended. If it's in the air, they've breathed it. They're crowded and stressed so that they have no resistance. If they've breathed it, they're walking cultures of it. That is why they're fed antibiotics as if antibiotics were vitamins, and that's the practice that allows MRSA to become the dominant strain and boring little Staphylococcus aureus to become a deadly epidemic.


I repeat: Please help keep the disease factories off America's plates.
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Kill the Bear

Here's an example of an animal rights petition I don't support. Facts: bears can and do kill humans, so the only justification for allowing bears to survive outside of a few high-walled and deep-moated wildlife preserves is to "farm" bears, systematically, in nature parks where hunters can harvest their eminently edible meat. (When chemical exposure makes people "sensitive" and "allergic" to almost everything else, what they can eat is bear.) And that means only a few bears, namely the ones with the most highly developed instinct to avoid humans, can be allowed to survive. I support bear hunting.



In fact, I support a 365-days-a-year open season on any bear, of any species, that's not separated from current or recent human habitations by a 30-foot cement wall on all sides.

The "bearskin" coat in which I was seen during the Big Freeze of 2010 was a sanitary modern product made from hypoallergenic, pleasant-smelling acrylic...but I'd even get behind a movement to bring back bearskin coats to call attention to the need to keep bear populations fully under control, which means, if you're not inside that cement wall around the nature preserve, and you see a bear, you either shoot it or call someone who will. (And if you don't, the penalty is that you may be locked inside the cement wall with the bears, and the rest of your short life may be used in educational videos about the nature of the genus Ursus.)

"
2015 saw Florida’s first state-sanctioned black bear hunt in 21 years. 304 mothers, cubs and adult males were killed in the name of population management.
The last of Florida’s wild land is being developed at astonishing rates. Because of human encroachment, bear-human conflict has risen. The answer, according to biologists, is to implement non-lethal techniques such as intelligent trash management and education. In fact, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s (FWC’s) own studies prove that trash management can reduce this conflict by as much as 95%. Yet, it was the FWC that greenlit this wholesale massacre, claiming it would help lower bears’ risks to people.
The FWC is now gathering 2015 data to determine whether to hold another hunt this year. We must urge them to act...in the best interest of the fragile Florida black bear population. This means putting an end to all future hunts.
Even in cases of overpopulation...[h]unters act as “super­predators” by taking healthy adults in their prime reproductive years, leaving the surviving population weaker. This is the exact opposite of the selection process performed by natural predators, and adds a whole additional threat to the bears' long ­term viability.
Opinion polls have consistently shown that the Florida public prefers non-lethal management to hunting. The FWC pointed to an increase in bear “nuisance calls” as evidence that their populations were out of hand and that hunting was warranted... 
There is not a single biologist on the board at the FWC, but there are many hunters. One must wonder, then, what motives lay behind the FWC’s removal of black bears from the state Endangered Species List in 2012 and their reopening of the hunting season three years later.
"
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Do You Eat at Olive Garden Restaurants?

I never have. I can't use wheat or cheese, and all the promotional material I've seen about the Olive Garden restaurants has focussed exclusively on wheat and cheese dishes. Since it's a pricey yuppie chain rather than a locally owned restaurant, I've not felt that I was actually missing much by giving Olive Garden restaurants a miss. Grandma Bonnie Peters, however, reported from Florida that a gluten-and-casein-tolerant friend there often took her and the friend's gluten-and-casein-intolerant adult children to the Olive Garden for special occasion meals, and they did find wheat-and-cheese-free food they were able to enjoy. Huzza.

However, this two-headed petition e-mailed from Food Democracy Now (below) does illuminate some points of major disagreement this web site has with an organization with which we often do agree. Exactly how does any specific farm contribute to real, measurable, local climate change? In what way is any restaurant menu item "unhealthy," for whom, relative to what? Why can't these workers live on $10 per hour--because they live in overpriced, overcrowded city neighborhoods? Why should we be asked to fund that choice, or other choices people may make that aren't healthy or frugal?

So much in Dave Murphy's e-mail begs to be debunked that it could even distract readers from the main point--when "antibiotics...are routinely fed to animals," those animals breed and spread the "super" germs that may make it so much more painful and expensive to recover from your next disease infection. Yes, we in the United States could benefit by reversing much of the twentieth century's misguided "progress" from family farms to factory farms, by making "progress" back to more small farms raising fewer animals in more natural, healthy conditions.

A hundred years ago, Americans normally ate raw eggs, in eggnog-type drinks and parfait-type desserts. (I'm one of the last Americans who, because my parents were "back to the land" types, grew up knowing that the warmish eggs I removed from the nests, after all the hens came around to the front yard for breakfast, were safe to eat raw or cooked.) Raw eggs became a health hazard only when and as the majority of eggs began to be produced by crowded, chronically diseased, factory-farm hens. Antibiotics no longer even slow down salmonella bacteria. Nearly all factory-farm fowl are infected with this disease so today, if we inadvertently bite into an omelet or a drumstick that's not thoroughly cooked, we can safely expect to feel sick by morning. The good news is that most humans have high resistance to most of the salmonella bacteria we consume, and feel sick only as long as the undercooked chicken product is inside us. But on an organic farm, where chickens strut around yards singing like the birds they are, rather than shuffling through rotting excrement in sties, salmonella is not a problem.

And every time a person who's been ill recently coughs, it used to be normal not to have to worry that they had MRSA and were going to have to spend a month in the hospital, taking expensive pills with horrible side effects, and then be coddled like invalids for another year, too. Staphylococcus bacteria may be the most common living things on Earth but, when whole populations of other creatures weren't being fed antibiotics daily to keep bacteria populations from exploding in crowded quarters, Staphylococcus aureus was a mostly harmless species that could be blamed for an occasional infected pimple only if teenagers ate too much junkfood or didn't bathe enough. Now we have humans dying of "Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus" pneumonia because we have factory farms systematically breeding MRSA by overusing antibiotics to breed out the normal strain of this "germ."

I don't endorse the second petition linked below. I do endorse the first one, and recommend it to you. We need to get our eggs and meat from more local farmers raising fewer fowl, with less cruelty.

"
Darden Restaurants, the parent company of mega-chain Olive Garden, owns and operates more than 1,500 restaurants, serves more than 320 million meals a year and employs more than 150,000 workers.
Unfortunately, rather than serving healthy food, Olive Gardens relies on factory farmed meat and dairy products that are raised in horrific, crowded conditions that seriously threaten our health and harms the environment. The truth is that up to 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are routinely fed to animals to help them grow faster and keep them from getting sick in overcrowded, filthy and polluting animal factories. These antibiotics get into our environment and fuel the rise of antibiotic resistance -- one of our nation’s leading public health threats.
Which is why Food Democracy Now! is working with our allies and environmental and healthy food advocates to launch a massive campaign to pressure Olive Garden to use its significant purchasing power to help grow a healthier, fairer and more sustainable food system.
Tell the owner of Olive Garden: Serve meat and dairy raised without routine antibiotics! Every voice counts!
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/tell_Olive_Garden_to_keep_antibiotics_off_your_plate2/?t=8&akid=1855.359821.QXkSRH
But reducing antibiotics use is just one of many critical fixes needed in our food system. Darden’s factory-farmed meat and dairy pollute our air and water and contribute to climate change. Many of its menu offerings are unhealthy. And it doesn’t pay its workers a living wage. As a whole, Darden’s food policies are a prime example of what not to do if we want to build a better food system. But together, we can change that.
With more than 1,500 restaurants, serving 320 million meals every year, Darden has a lot of power to move our food system in a better direction. By serving smaller portion sizes of more humane and sustainable meat and dairy, and offering more organic and plant-based choices, Darden can improve public health and help reduce food waste, conserve water, curb greenhouse gas emissions and shift production away from factory farms. It can also create better markets for local, independent farmers and ranchers who aren’t at the mercy of large corporate meat companies.
If we can get Darden to act, it will put even more pressure on other restaurants to follow suit. Join environmental, public health, and worker justice activists in this historic campaign to urge Olive Garden and other Darden restaurants to improve their menu offerings and pay fair wages.
Tell Darden, the nation’s largest full service restaurant company: Serve greener meals that are better for our health, the planet and workers!
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/tell_Olive_Garden_to_keep_antibiotics_off_your_plate2/?t=11&akid=1855.359821.QXkSRH
Even if you don’t eat at Darden Restaurants, their purchasing decisions have a big impact on our food system!
Thanks for participating in food democracy,
Dave Murphy
Founder / Executive Director
Food Democracy Now!
"
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Sunday, May 1, 2016

Book Review: The Faith Club

(Reclaimed from Blogjob. Tags: ecumenism, interfaith discussions, interfaith religious fellowship, liberal Christian, liberal Jewish, liberal Muslim.)

A Fair Trade Book
Title: The Faith Club
Author: Ranya Idliby, Susanne Oliver, Priscilla Warner
Priscilla Warner's web site: https://priscillawarnerbooks.com/
Date: 2006 (hardcover), 2007 (paperback)
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 0-7432-9048-8
Length: 396 pages including (trilingual!) appendices
Quote: “We’re three mothers...who got together to write a picture book for our children that would highlight the connections between our religions...We realized that before we could talk about what united us we had to confront what divided us.”
In the early 1990's I belonged to a car pool of three writers who lived in northern Virginia and frequently spent weekends (and the Gulf War weeks) in Pittsburgh. We met through a newspaper ad: a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian. We realized that this combination would be excellent for a car pool, because it guaranteed that whoever was driving would be kept awake with lively conversation. Sometimes the religious debates became very lively indeed...but somehow we never had to stop the car. Somehow we became friends.
After 2001, authors Idliby, Oliver, and Warner achieved a similar kind of friendship. Their conversation looks bland and tactful on paper, yet the women disagree more intensely, at a more personal level, than women of their age and class normally tolerate. Sometimes their blood pressure rose; Warner mentions having to take extra pills for a cardiac condition. Nevertheless, they say, they’ve stuck it out and bonded as friends.
The authors’ friendship may be facilitated by the fact that each woman represents the liberal extreme in her religious community. Idliby, a descendant of Palestinian expatriates, felt like an outsider in Lebanon, rarely visited a mosque, and covered her hair only when praying. Oliver, brought up Catholic, joined a more liberal Episcopal group as an adult. Warner, born Jewish, didn’t even think she believed in God when the project began. These writers are committed to a sort of edge-blurring universalism. I believe it would have been possible for writers who practice their religion in more traditional ways to have talked about their differences as friends too.
They discuss the life and death of Jesus, whether Christians actually blame Jews for it, the stereotypes members of each group have about the others, the possibility of conversion, the ways the women “lean on” God during personal crises, the boundary disputes in the Middle East, prayer, rituals, beliefs about death, conversations with religious leaders, holidays, community, and the fact that each woman found this interfaith project to be a real spiritual experience. While they were writing this book, Idliby found a mosque to call home, Warner realized that she did believe in God, and Oliver worked through areas of doubt and confusion. Through the whole book, each woman consistently practices compassion for the others.
Readers will find plenty to agree with and to disagree with in this book. Warner, I think, does an excellent job of explaining why some Jewish people brace themselves to hear “-killer” every time they hear “Christ.” Then again, I’ve heard homeless paranoid-schizophrenics do a fine job of explaining why they think radio waves aggravate their mental problems. I think there’s some kernel of truth in what the schizophrenics are saying too. I don’t think paranoid people need to imagine that anyone else is going to want to participate in paranoia.
The main body of the text ends on page 293 of this book. The next 103 pages include a bibliography, appendices in English, Hebrew, and Arabic for reading groups, and questions and suggestions for those who want to form their own “faith clubs.”
The authors identify several groups of people to whom this book may be particularly helpful: “White male politicians..anyone who is interested in religion...people who know a lot about their religion, people who know very little, people who question whether there is a God, young people, old people.” Basically, any human could learn something from The Faith Club.
The book has sold well and is widely available, often for less than this site's minimum price of $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment. If you buy it as a Fair Trade Book, how will each of the three living authors get an equal share of the $1 payment to the author? Maybe they can agree on a charity?
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Friday, April 29, 2016

What Makes a Great Blog?

(Blogjob tags: advertising on blog sites, advertising on social sites, Associated Content, Blogjob, Blogspot, comparison among Internet writing sites, Google +, Live Journal, must blogs be personal, niche audience for blogs, should blogs be more like television, Twitter, types of blog readers, why different people read blogs.)

This post was suggested by @rextrulove , in an in-house forum discussion of "what makes a quality blog post." @rextrulove suggested (in a reply to another Blogjob friend who often posts "my day" type content) that "quality" blog posts should be more impersonal, more like magazine articles or newspaper reports rather than "me-me-me."
Well...to me, if it's not personal, it's a (short, probably underresearched) article rather than a blog post. (Commercial sites' "blogs" that feature handfuls of short articles about their product or service are probably just what those sites' customers want, but they're not Real Blogs.) Then again, if it's too personal, it might be a boring blog post.
Or--"All the Facts Ever Gathered About the Frog Species..." is an article, and should be paid and published as such. (Some sponsors always want to pay less for more. Writers must not let them. Writers are sufficiently underpaid already.)
"What I Learned by Looking Up This Frog I Saw Today" is a blog post, specifically a phenology post, which is one niche market I've been able to tap into (and enjoy reading).
"I Look Like a Frog Because All I Did All Day Was Sit Around Watching TV" is probably a boring blog post, though it shows more insight than really boring bloggers achieve.
But it seems to me that what too many advertisers want is for blogs to be more like television--bland, with "opinions" only if they parrot Mr. Bigshot's own, lots of blather about current products that aren't actually good enough to sell themselves, more pictures than words, more emotion (but only fake, hyped-up cheerfulness) than thought, and no suggestion of interest in life without the overmarketed products...and that's where bloggers need to take a stand.
Because what advertisers like is not what actual readers like. If readers wanted content that's more like television, they would be watching television.
Without doing any formal research, just considering what user-tracking software has told me about different blog sites for years, it seems to me that blog readers fit into a few distinct categories:
  1. Occasional readers who are surfing the'Net or looking up some specific topic. They are not interested in a blog or blogger as such.
  2. Unwanted readers--spammers, hackers, spybots. Some days this is the largest category of readers.
  3. Site managers and moderators checking for problems.
  4. Bloggers, ourselves, checking how the blog looks and how much we've already said on the topic that's on our minds today.
  5. Bloggers' personal friends, fans, and e-friends. This group of readers are interested in "my day" posts.
  6. Those "niche markets" of people who share bloggers' interests--the game, sports, phenology, book, vampire, or other "communities." This group are more interested in the topic than the blogger. They may or may not bother reading "my day" posts. They'll follow a blog as long as it contains enough about their topic.
  7. Researchers, who do want magazine-quality if not book-quality content, if they can find it online. They're the ones who don't want links to blogs to turn up on web searches. They're totally uninterested in blogs and will read a blog post only if they can't find enough material at a reference site.
  8. Advertisers, who, according to recent scientific studies, probably entered that field and thrive in it because they have fundamentally different brains that limit their ability even to talk to readers in any of the other categories.
Advertisers literally own television...which is why many readers seldom watch television, and won't read blogs that are more like television.
This is what I've observed since joining Blogjob last summer. Writing Internet content has been my job for more than ten years.
Although I was new to the job when I started writing for Associated Content, I had thousands of readers there. AC (1) paid writers enough that we could do a limited amount of actual (fun, cheap) research in order to write articles rather than blogs; and (2) suggested topics for worthwhile articles that would fit in with impersonal, content-related rather than reader-stalking, advertisements; and (3) had, before they sold out to Yahoo, real live human editors who spotted flaws and suggested improvements. Any of those three things would be a huge improvement in any of the writing sites that exist today, but advertisers would have to pay for them.
Then I moved to Blogspot as an Amazon Associate, which doesn't pay. For the first three years the Amazon interface software never worked at all. Guidance about what people wanted to read came entirely from readers and was almost exclusively about politics, which left me feeling that the politics section was eating my blog. Blogspot is hosted by Google, where at least one major shareholder has published his desire to censor our kind of politics completely out of cyberspace:
Nevertheless, and despite being a blog and therefore hidden by search engines, the Blogspot has consistently enjoyed 10-20% of the daily readership I had at Associated Content. Hundreds, but never thousands. (Yes, I blog about topics obscure enough that people do stumble across the Blogspot via search engines.)
So I was finally invited to post the same kind of content at Blogjob...and it's so much the same kind of content that I decide what to post where by putting two posts on Blogjob and the third post of the day, if there is one, on Blogspot. I've seldom bothered to post links to Blogspot posts even on Google +. I've consistently posted links to Blogjob posts on Google +, Twitter, and Live Journal. I've cross-linked from one site to the other, alerting readers that they'll find more of their kind of content at the other site. Yesterday I put "Part 1" on Blogjob and "Part 2" on Blogspot. And still, the Blogjob has consistently enjoyed 10-20% of the daily readership the Blogspot gets. Dozens, but never hundreds. Hardly more than my never-publicized, seldom-used Live Journal attracts.
Three likely reasons: (1) Blogspot employs more site monitors. (2) Blogspot attracts undesirable readers. (3) Blogjob allows some types of ads--ads that stalk readers rather than tying into content, ads that pop up while pages are loading, ads that block readers' view of the content--that some readers hate. Those readers won't click on a link to Blogjob, much less on the ads we Blogjobbers conscientiously add to our posts. My Blogspot partner won't read my Blogjob.
Advertisers love ads that distract readers from content. Readers hate them.
Advertisers hate "personal opinions," especially when "your personal opinions about politics conflict with mine and those of the people I've hired." Some readers hate opinions different from their own, too...but others don't. Advertisers who've decided, e.g., that supporting same-sex marriage or tax-funded abortion shall be their new dare-to-be-trendy bid for sympathy from aggrieved groups to which they do not personally belong, really hate the "opinions" of, e.g., women who've never wanted tax-funded abortion. (Or LGBT-types who've never wanted same-sex marriage. Or African-Americans who don't feel represented by President Obama.) Readers, however, just might be in those categories that advertisers loathe, and they like posts that at least show due respect to their opinions.
Advertisers love posts that rave over new, still largely untested, products. Readers are very unlikely to enjoy (or trust) them. Readers will read an occasional honest "Funeral Poem for a Dead Space Heater" or "Ode to My Good Old Clunker of a Car," and like it, but they'll avoid a blog that reads like a store catalog.
Advertisers like lots of images of smiling, overgroomed humans in fashionable clothes. Readers like fewer images, and prefer close-up, clearly detailed photos of objects, plants, or animals.
Advertisers, and some readers, find it easier to learn from a "how to" video than from a "how to" article. More readers, like most writers, may tolerate an occasional, simple, amusing video if their browser happens to support it, but generally dislike videos.
Advertisers would like it if more readers thought the way they do. Scientific studies suggest that this won't happen; these differences are wired into our brains, possibly before birth.
Readers, not advertisers, made the great blogs what they are. When I think of "quality blogs" I think of Matt Drudge, Brad Hicks, Michelle Malkin, Daily Kos, Scott Adams, the late lamented Ozarque...people, including me, are still reading and citing Ozarque's blog after her death. Now that's "quality" in a blog. Those are blogs advertisers dream of being able to exploit and, by and large, can't.
That kind of quality is not achieved by trying to offer advertisers too much of what they want. It can be maintained when bloggers are willing to work with those advertisers who, like Amazon, are willing to work with us...but it is achieved by consistently putting readers first.
Maybe Blogjob ads would be more profitable if advertisers put readers first, too.
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