Robert Hurt on Jobs and the Economy

From U.S. Representative Robert Hurt:

"House Passes Hurt Jobs Bill

The House also continued its work on the pressing issue of job creation by passing the Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act with bipartisan support. While the country has begun to experience modest economic growth, unemployment remains too high in Virginia's Fifth District, and wages are not growing enough to make working families feel that our economy has recovered. Small businesses also continue to be stifled by excessive federal regulation that stands in the way of more dynamic job creation across Virginia and our nation.

The legislation passed by the House on Wednesday combines the text of 11 bills, all of which address unnecessary or excessive federal regulations hindering our small businesses from accelerating job growth.

The Small Company Disclosure Simplification Act, which I introduced with my Democratic colleague Congresswoman Terri Sewell during the 113th Congress, was incorporated into the legislation. The provision we introduced removes burdensome regulations for small public companies and requires the SEC to perform a cost benefit analysis on the rule’s impact on these companies, offering a practical step forward to ensure that our regulatory structure does not disproportionately burden smaller companies and dis-incentivize start-ups from accessing the public markets. By streamlining these requirements, small companies will now be able focus on innovating, expanding, and creating jobs.

As the 114th Congress continues, we in the House will continue to advance bipartisan solutions like this one that get Washington out of the way and allow our small businesses and family farms to focus on succeeding and creating good-paying jobs. It is my hope that our colleagues in the Senate will now take up this bill and join us in advancing policies that will spur job creation and economic recovery.

If you need any additional information or if we may be of assistance to you, please visit my website at hurt.house.gov or call my Washington office: (202) 225-4711, Charlottesville office: (434) 973-9631, Danville office: (434) 791-2596, or Farmville office: (434) 395-0120.

Robert spoke with Delegate Lee Ware at the Business Leaders Roundtable on Virginia’s Economic Future.

Sincerely,

"

Book Review: The Rainmaker

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Rainmaker

       
Author: John Grisham

Author's web page: http://www.jgrisham.com/

       
Date: 1995

       
Publisher: Doubleday

       
ISBN: 0-385-42473-6

       
Length: 443 pages

       
Quote: “My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realized my father hated the legal profession.”

       
With this line, Grisham’s protagonist/narrator, Rudy, begins an exploration of the male psyche that runs deeper than some critics like to admit. As a story about a lawsuit, The Rainmaker is unlikely. As a study of the fantasy lives of gifted young men, it’s wonderfully frank.

       
I inherited this novel from my husband, who usually read only nonfiction and mysteries. I don’t remember his ever talking about it, and suspect it may have been a gift from someone who’d heard about his interest in Tony Hillerman’s Navajo-country mystery series. If so it was a mistake. There are no Navajos in The Rainmaker, nor is there a drought, nor much hope of a drought—it’s set in muggy Memphis . Rudy is what contemporary corporate jargon called a “rainmaker,” meaning “someone who can generate a lot of revenue for the corporation.” Part of the comic relief in his story is that he’s never allowed to generate revenue for a corporation, even though he could...Grisham is not known as a comic writer, but he has his moments.

       
Rudy nearly misses his chance to become a lawyer—ironically, because he shows signs of talent. As a student, he was one of the more promising members of his class, and was therefore offered a position with a local firm. The firm then sold out to an even bigger and more prestigious firm, and, just before graduation, the job promised to Rudy was cut from the company’s list. As The Rainmaker begins we find Rudy freshly jilted by a brilliant but heartless law school classmate and so desperate for work that he pleads with one of the older attorneys in town that a J.D. ought to be qualified for a paralegal position.

       
Even if his motivation for practicing law is not a true vocation, Rudy is bright. He soon finds himself taking on what appears to be a challenging case against the firm that denied him the job he’d been offered. He perseveres, and what initially seems impossible becomes what even cautious Rudy admits is “a slam dunk.” Playing the David-and-Goliath angle for all it’s worth, he wins the biggest award of punitive damages in the history of the state. It doesn’t hurt anything, of course, that upon investigation his client becomes more sympathetic, and his opponent’s client more dastardly, than one can readily imagine real litigants to be. Rudy wouldn’t know how to make his opponents look like disgraces to the name of “slime mold,”  nor does he try; they make themselves look that way, because they really are.

       
Then, instead of behaving like a Real Lawyer, Rudy suddenly begins behaving like a Real Guy Who Could Do Anything He Wanted To Do When He Was Twenty-Five. Having triumphed in law, he becomes a sort of modern-day outlaw. I don’t want to spoil the suspense, but let’s just say that any resemblance between Rudy and any real lawyer living or dead is purely coincidental.

       
It's an enjoyable read if you're adult enough to enjoy stories about work, anyway, and I recommend giving it to anyone who's ever nagged that you should have gone to law school so that you could be making more money now. As a Fair Trade Book, it will cost $5 for the book, $5 for shipping (one shipping charge covers as many books as can be shipped in one package), and out of this total of $10 John Grisham or a charity of his choice gets $1. If you want to encourage a madly successful novelist, buy this book here. If you want to encourage a more obscure writer, feel free to use the comment space to suggest one.

Book Review: Indians Are Us

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Indians Are Us

       
Author: Ward Churchill

Author's web page: http://wardchurchill.net/
       
Date: 1994

       
Publisher: Common Courage Press

       
ISBN: 1-56751-020-5

       
Length: 357 pages

       
Illustrations: black-and-white reprints of graphics from various sources

       
Quote: “[S]uggestions that Indians should actually be referred to as composing nations rather than tribes are often met with rather flippant (or vociferous) dismissal as being ‘rhetori­cal,’ ‘polemical’ or...‘politically cor­rect.’”

       
In 1994 Ward Churchill was an angry young man who’d done a lot of homework. He didn’t just sit around saying, as some Cherokee people had been saying for years, that the Van Buren administration’s policy toward Native Americans could have been the inspiration for Hitler’s policy toward German Jews. He dug up the documentation that it really was.

I don't agree with Churchill about a lot of things--he's often introduced in news media by phrases like "radical Leftist professor"--but I do give him credit for putting that documentation together. He's done substantial research, and he is a talented and witty writer, even if he's been known to put wittiness ahead of accuracy...prior to the nineteenth century, did any Cherokee ever use godagewi to refer to a carrot?

       
The articles collected in Indians Are Us address many legitimate grievances, some of them recent and some of them ongoing, that have never been fully addressed. Although they are research papers whose greatest value is bringing hundreds of references together in one place, and the whole stories are usually told in the primary documents referenced here, this book does index a whole historical reference library in one convenient-sized volume.

       
It suffers, nevertheless, from two flaws. One is that, since Churchill begins with the rather absurd argument that misappropriating a group’s collective name is genocide, it’s downright ludicrous that he consistently refers to the descendants of pre-Columbian Americans as “Indians.” Even when he quotes a tongue-in-cheek public statement by the artist Jimmie Durham (who claimed Cherokee ancestry but was not registered as a member of the Cherokee Nation), “I am not an American Indian, nor have I ever seen or sworn loyalty to India,” Churchill persists in referring to himself and other Cherokee, Creek, Dakota, Iroquois, Navaho, and similar ethnic types as Indians.

       
The other is that, although he offers readers an excellent understanding of the problem, he doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions. Not for the United States as a whole, and not for private individuals like Jimmie Durham, or like me, who have distant Cherokee ancestors, but feel that after our more recent ancestors enjoyed all the benefits of Whiteness during the years of blatant official racism, it would be on the tacky side to claim that Cherokee was still our primary identity.

       
Pages 65-72 of Indians Are Us make the case that the existence of sports teams with names like “Illini” and “Redskins” amounts to genocide. There’s no historical parallel for this argument. (The Nazi version of the Anglo-Israelite theory claimed that Jews were Edomites not Israelites—there’s no parallel here.) I've never read that any Nazis  “lowered” themselves or their children by organizing sports teams known as “Jews” or “Romany” or even “Teutonic French.” In fact the sports Nazi Germany had to offer young men were, at first, track and fighting (which don’t require expensive equipment), and, later, competitive shooting, against grown-up soldiers, in trenches. Germany became dangerous because Nazionalsozialism bankrupted Germany so much faster than other brands of socialism did other countries.

       
The contemporary point that illustrates the flaws in Churchill’s argument, here, is that Irish-Americans don’t perceive the existence of a team called the “Fighting Irish” as “genocide.” (If they weren’t a good team, maybe...) Nor do New Englanders moan and carry on about the fact that most of the “Yankees”  are neither real descendants of New England colonists, nor yet even residents of New England. Churchill identifies “Redskins” as hate speech, and proposes a few other obnoxious team names, like “Drunken Irish.” Which puts the flaw in this whole chapter clearly in view. The Washington team is not “The Drunken Redskins,” or “The Dirty Redskins,” or “The Thieving Redskins,” or any other phrase that really was used in the hate speech of the years between 1800 and 1950. “The Redskins,” all by itself, could just as reasonably be heard as a way of describing what happened to light-complexioned athletes who started practicing intensively in time for the national football season, in Washington, before sunblock was invented. (I've heard jokes about it describing what other teams have done to the Washington team in games...although I think the federal government has no business regulating the nicknames of football teams, I also think Dan Snyder might want to consider other names that would go with burgundy-gold-black-and-white.)

       
More than that: some of the fighting that has occurred in Ireland was as bad, for the collective image of Irish people and for the individual people of Ireland, as drunkenness was for Irish or Native American or any other kind of people. However, Irish-Americans don’t perceive “The Fighting Irish” as a defamation of anyone's character; we perceive it as a sort of salute to the facts that (a) when Irish people have decided to fight, they’ve been brave and tough about it; and (b) a lot of Irish boys have played on the team.

       
But suppose the owners of the Washington team decide that (a) puritanism is back in style, and the nation’s capital shouldn’t be associated with the practice of paying grown men to play childish games, or (b) if Washington has a football team, that team should have a nickname that reminds people of something about Washington. Anyone can think of a few dozen possibilities: Federals; G-Men; T-Men; Commanders, or Chiefs; Monuments, or Monumentals; Attractions; Tourists and Commuters; Keys, as in the Key Bridge; Peregrines (around the turn of the century the city started publicizing its pride in having attracted a family of urbanized peregrine falcons, but “Falcons” is taken); Bald Eagles (as distinct from the other team called Eagles)...I have no problem cheering for a Washington home team with a real Washington name, e.g. “Nationals.”  And the beerier and less inhibited team boosters could have a good time working out a half-time routine that is (a) suggestive of the team’s name, in some way that’s obvious even to fans who have drunk a whole six-pack, and (b) silly. And exactly what is this going to do for some Navaho family who aren’t getting decent prices for their wool rugs and turquoise bracelets, and have to depend on strip mining to buy food?

       
Churchill goes on to ridicule Robert Bly (a cartoon of the paunchy poet appears on the front of the book) and other New Age types who wish to incorporate some sort of Native American flavor into their religious rituals. By and large his judgment on the authenticity of the real and alleged Native American spiritual teachers of the 1990s is reliable. Wallace Black Elk, Archie Fire Lamedeer, and Ed Eagleman McGaa: real members of the traditions they’ve marketed, although their commercial exploitation of the traditions has been denounced by others in their groups.

Dhyani Ywahoo, Gary Eagle-Walking-Turtle McClain, some others not familiar to me: probably of Native American descent, but actually commercializing something different from the traditions of their alleged ancestors. (Ywahoo, whose name and face are obviously multiethnic, admits that her “Etowah Band” was not really recognized by the Cherokee Nation, nor were their crystal and chanting rituals of Cherokee origin. In her book the phrasing is that she has “not divulged any secrets.” The facts that “Dhyani” is an Indian, not Cherokee, name and that much of the philosophy in Voices of Our Ancestors is also Asian are fairly obvious clues.) Brooke Medicine Eagle is incorrectly described by Churchill as “a bogus Cherokee”; by 1994 he should have been able to get some clues to her real identity and ethnic origin, and the real origins of her school of New Age psychotherapy, from Buffalo Woman Comes Singing. (The book has merit when read as a story of how a multiethnic American patched together, out of family tradition, her own formal and informal studies, and the traditions of people she knew, an approach to emotional healing and personal growth that can actually help people. “Medicine Eagle” is not a Cherokee name, and if Churchill has any evidence that Medicine Eagle ever claimed that it was, he needs to present that evidence. She says she's from the Plains.)

Carlos Castaneda, Mary Summer Rain, and Lynn Andrews are best read, if you enjoy reading them, as novelists who have blurred and fictionalized the identities, origins, and teachings of any Native American teachers they ever had out of all recognition. Medicine Woman is not about the Dakota tradition but it is a lively, romance-free, feminist novel, which I enjoy as such. Castaneda’s “don Juan” may have been, like Zorba the Greek, a celebration of a memorable individual friend but can hardly be read by adults as a study of the friend’s whole culture.

       
The question of whether people without verifiable lineal descent from the founder of a tradition should be allowed to learn, practice, and pass on the tradition is hard to resolve. That the question arises is tragic. Perhaps descendants of immigrants can best understand the tragedy by imagining this scenario: You are suddenly invited to a special dinner at the embassy of a country from which one or more of your ancestors immigrated to the United States. At the dinner you are told that, due to a bizarre combination of murders, mysterious diseases, and disappearances having stripped your ancestral country of two thousand members of its extended royal family, you have been invited here on the grounds of your distant kinship to the country's aristocracy, in the hope that you can found the next royal family. Is this scenario flattering? Can you imagine this situation without horror? Indians Are Us is one long outburst of that kind of horror. 

       
Churchill makes what I believe to be his point—that most of the pre-Columbian cultures of North America are not dead, and deserve to be respectfully heard as a cultural, even political, influence, rather than “channelled” as dead spirits into a mishmash of imprecise “spiritual” scholarship—with more clarity when he writes about the dispute over which artists qualify for any special benefits as being “Native American.”

       
Even when he accuses people of calling groups like the Cherokee “tribes” rather than “peoples” or “nations,” however, he’s off the mark. He goes back into remote history to claim that “tribes” is normally used of animals. (It is not, and never was, except in scientific jargon.) The real difference between a tribe and a nation is the difference between a large extended family and an organized political entity. Tribes may exist within a national organization, or subsist as hunters and gatherers; either way, what makes them “tribes” is that, if called on to make a decision as a group, they’re lucky if they can agree on who should represent the group in negotiation or how the decision should be made. Some small disorganized groups, like the Nacostchunk on the Anacostia River, or the Melungeons in Tennessee, can only be described as tribes. It would not be unreasonable to describe the seven traditional sub-groupings in the Cherokee Nation as “tribes,” although “clans” is the word they use; no clan seems to have functioned as a political organization claiming sovereignty. The large group of all people whose primary identity is Cherokee has been an organized nation for a long time. To speak of “the Cherokee tribe” is not  disrespectful so much as it is inaccurate. An analogy might be speaking of “the county of Texas.” On the other hand, to speak of “the Powhatan nation” would be more like speaking of “the sovereign state of Dallas.” The claim that confusion about tribes and nations reflects hate, rather than lack of information, needs more evidence than Churchill has.

       
Indians Are Us is not a book to be easily condemned with faint praise. People who hoped that learning to pronounce “mitakuye oyasin” would solve all the problems of our “first nations” needed to be shown how much harder than that a real solution would be. I still imagine the sellouts who “began to trade blankets, beadwork, medicine bags—their younger sisters, if need be—for half-pints of rotgut whiskey” to have been considerably more degenerate than Dakotas like Wallace Black Elk, or “Plains” mixed breeds like Brooke Medicine Eagle. I still needed, and evidently some readers still do need, more insight into the kind of issues that have to be redressed before any real attempt to reconcile Native and immigrant American cultures can be made.

       
It’s worth reading Indians Are Us, if you’re up to the spiritual discipline of it, as an indictment of the greedhead tendencies within you, your family, the people with whom you work (regardless of your ethnicity) as they have conflicted with the natural, sustainable tendencies. Churchill anticipates a need to prevent those greedy for the prestige of “learning” from coming to pretend, or actually feel, that they know more about Native American culture than people actually living on “tribal” land. Some of us see similar things happening among the demographic groups that include us, even our demographic generations. In her first prose book, Dakota, Kathleen Norris wrote about the fear mostly Anglo-American family farmers expressed that they would “become the next Indians” driven off the land by greedhead corporations like Monsanto. The black-and-white moral conflict going on here is not the same thing as the Red-and-White ethnic conflict. For many of us the moral and ethical conflict may be of more immediate interest.

       
In the end I (predictably) find Indians Are Us disappointing. I don’t think Churchill is asking enough of readers. I think his haste to express the horror and indignation he was feeling weakened his book. The positive things he asks readers to do—boycott off-reservation sweat lodges, modify sloppy speech patterns, change the names of a few sports teams—are absurdly disproportionate to the existing problems. The book says very little about sustainable agriculture, ecologically sound industry, frugality, generosity, hospitality, respect for elders, or care for children, as areas in which all Americans can benefit from studying what was written about the first Americans; nor does it tackle the messy problems of overpopulation. Nor does it say much about addressing the economic needs of impoverished Native Americans in more helpful ways than buying a ticket to participate in some knock-off of some exotic cultural ritual. Indians Are Us seems meant to leave all readers holding a bunch of emotional loose ends. And politically...oh, why get me started on the many and inevitable failures of socialism?

Nevertheless: I've read it, and I recommend that others read it...partly because Indians Are Us can help you appreciate just how inadequate, as a response, carrying on about the names of football teams is. The book is easy to find online. You may find a better price than this site's minimum online price of $5 for the book, $5 for shipping. If you pay that price here, however, this web site will indeed send Ward Churchill or a charity of his choice a dollar, or one-tenth of the price of however many of his books you buy through our Fair Trade Books system.

Book Review: Wheatfields and Vineyards

Book Review: Wheatfields and Vineyards

       
Author:  Ralph W. Seager

       
Date: 1975

       
Publisher: Christian Herald

       
ISBN: 0-915684-00-4

       
Length: 94 pages

       
Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: “The winds of March wind up the willow trees / All through the day, until their springs are tight.”

       
Professor Seager wrote from the Appalachian foothills of New York state. The phenomenon whereby circular storm winds moving out from the Midwest usually break up, as they approach the mountains, into a mild wind that shifts from one direction to the other after a few hours, is common throughout the mountain region.

       
I am, like C.S. Lewis, so coarse the things some poets see are obstinately invisible to me; I can’t see why Seager chose to write “The high hawk hangs on the thread of hunger” rather than “The hawk hangs high...” To my mind, these mostly rhyming poems are flawed, but still enjoyable. They paint pictures of animals, places, and people. If you’re attracted to the idea of painting pictures with words, you’ll like Wheatfields and Vineyards.

       
Although they were published by Christian Herald Press, most of the poems aren’t religious. “Protect Me Not” is more cute than evangelical:

                  “My policy states that I am covered

                From loss by various acts of God...

                still we cannot compensate,

                to wit, the following risks to you:

                The act of arson in the fall

                when ivy sets fire to your wall—

                nor shady deals and other gyps

                when the sun goes in eclipse—

                ...I waive all claims against such fraud;

                Protect me not from these acts of God.”

       
Then there’s an epitaph that borders on being cute, although it doesn’t offend me:

                  “His life was uphill like his haying,

                With hardship and ill fortune preying

                Parasitic on their host,

                He never had much chance to coast...

                God leaned down to fourscore seven,

                And gave a hand-up into heaven.”

       
There are, however, a half-dozen religious poems, not precisely orthodox: “Although your patience with me must be tried, / I come to you as Self—not Self denied,” Seager tells “the Lord.” 

       
All of these poems express love—of place, of nature, of traditions, and of course of people. Perhaps the love lyrics addressed to people are the weakest. A list of those of Seager’s favorite things that have names beginning with C, which starts with a rhyme scheme it can’t sustain, calls to mind the kindergarten-level “Sound Box” books by Jane Belk Moncure (the poem is, of course, leading up to a woman’s name). On the other hand, the image of

                  “A weed of a woman in white and blue...

                A wispy, dusty white she was—

                Blue hat—and a cane of hickory;

                I see her every time I see

                Queen Anne’s lace and chicory”

is as lively and lovely a portrait of an old lady as I’ve seen in any book.

If you like the lines quoted here, Wheatfields and Vineyards is for you. Online, it will cost $5 + $5 shipping, which is the best I can do on any online book, and since Ralph Seager no longer needs the dollar our pricing allows on Fair Trade Books, I won't be offended if you find a better deal at another online bookstore.

Link Log for January 19

Today's computer agenda began with "Deal with e-mail issues" and then "Catch up on social stuff," so this will be a long Link Log. First of all: Happy birthday to Grandma Bonnie Peters, who turned eighty years old yesterday and still has no immediate plans to retire.

Now the first link...I remember reading Girl in Translation about ten years ago. Here's a nice review:

https://wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/girl-in-translation-by-jean-kwok-the-monday-book/

Want to share your business-related resolutions for 2015? (I'm afraid to!)

http://marshasspot.blogspot.com/2015/01/all-business-monday-to-do-list.html

Some people seem to think this is ludicrous, but seriously...the way some people act when I walk to a job shows that yes, here in these United States, we still have some so-called Christians who believe that women should cover ourselves in motor vehicles when we go out on the street. A burqa is much cheaper and easier to wear. Not to mention less likely to kill people.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/19/christian-mom-who-worries-leggings-could-lead-men-to-think-lustful-thoughts-reveals-her-personal-solution-to-the-problem/?

Unbearably cute British bird pictures, and videos if your computer plays them:

http://watching-bingley-birds.blogspot.com/2015/01/meet-long-tailed-tits.html

A nice free-verse poem about niceness here...

http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/3545780.html

I had to read that one because it's about yarn, so here's a personal project update. Last autumn I posted that I'd made it a winter project to knit one of all the projects discussed in Knitting for Peace (using leftover yarn from a scrap bag) and sell the book. I've made most of them, but still have the Warm Up America and Project Linus blankets left to go...saving the blankets for last because there won't be enough of any one yarn to make them look like anything but Odds & Ends anyway. I'm pleased with the garments though; the shawl, especially, contains many luxury yarns and looks as if it had been both expensive and carefully planned, rather than being a quick way to use up scraps. (It's not a Blanket Shawl. I'd planned to give it to a fashionista friend for Christmas, but had to see her reaction to it first. She looked at it and wailed, "It's not as thick and warm as your shawl." So she got a cheaper scarf.) Anyway, if you have (1) knitted or crocheted more beautiful blankets than the people you know need, or (2) started making a blanket but given up trying to finish it, or (3) aspired to be in category (1) but feared you'd end up in category (2), Warm Up America and Project Linus are two legitimate charities that can help with these problems. (Grace Ellen fans may want to read about Project Linus here...

http://childrenscancerrecovery.org/partner/sponsors/? )

Speaking of Grace Ellen, here's her TV interview on You Tube.

http://thesmittenedlife.blogspot.com/2015/01/childrens-hospital-los-angeles-imagine.html

Some things aren't fixable. Fortunately a lot of things are...

http://marshasspot.blogspot.com/2015/01/super-sunday-reviews-how-to-fix.html

For those who've been circulating the fiction that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, Dominic Green recommends some books that discuss his private antichristian views.

http://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2015/01/nazis-islam.html

Too bad for some local lurkers...Green Bay lost the big game yesterday. Dave Urbanski has video:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/18/seattle-seahawks-defeat-the-green-bay-packers-in-overtime-thriller-advance-to-super-bowl/?

For those who've been following the anti-freedom riots in Paris...less violent, but equally censorious, leftists strike the Santa Barbara News-Press. Yes, I stand with the News-Press's right to use a legitimate term that offends some of their readers, if they so choose.

http://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2015/01/say-illegals-and-get-paint-bombed.html

Will any technology ever make it possible to be completely unaware of people around us in real life while we're plugged into the'Net? I hope not. Anyway I commented on this one.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/108361129611/alone-together-technology

How to buy a house for $15,000...yes, there's a catch: it's in Michigan.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/17/when-you-hear-how-little-they-paid-for-this-house-youll-be-shocked-even-after-you-read-where-the-house-is/?

In Florida, a untrained hound points out an egret to his human (armed with camera)...and the egret poses, right on a suburban street, until a passer-by blows a horn. I believe it. I've seen herons who were this "tame," or bold, or whatever.

http://www.dogpawsitivetidbits.com/2015/01/great-white-waterbird-hunter.html

In primary school I remember reading about the heroism of Jesse Lazear, a colleague of Walter Reed who proved that mosquitoes carried deadly diseases by letting a mosquito infect him with one. This Canadian researcher at least seems to have been able to study less deadly pests...

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/16/after-allowing-bedbugs-to-feed-on-her-for-five-years-woman-makes-tremendous-discovery/

Hard to be sure from these photos, but it looks as if Hadley, the youngest cat at the Big Stone Gap bookstore, may be some sort of cousin to our lamented Candice (and her father, Pitt, who's not been around the Cat Sanctuary for a while, and her daughter, Heather, who's still our Reigning Queen). Why am I so devotedly following another bookstore's posts? Aren't they The Competition? Not exactly; I'd actually like my real-world store to be a franchise of the Welches'. Well, they said, in The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, that they don't want a franchise. That's fine. In today's publishing world bookstores can actually network. For a long time good books have been shoved into oblivion before people had time to discover them because publishers kept shoving newer things onto shelves. This can change--it's one of the easier improvements we can make in our world. Today the Internet is a tool that allows secondhand bookstores to function as complements rather than competitors to one another, the way libraries do. When my store has a real-world home again, you'll be able to walk in, ask for a secondhand book that The Other Stores have but we don't, and hear "We don't have that one, but it's right on the shelf in Kingsport or Big Stone Gap...would you like to have them hold it for you, or mail it to you?" Or vice versa. There are too many good older books out there for one store to have all of them, but if multiple secondhand booksellers pool our efforts...

https://wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/little-orphant-hadleys-come-to-our-house-to-stay/

Ann Mackie Miller posted another batch of British bird images that's too good not to miss. Scroll down to catch the action sequence. If it's not still shots from a movie, it could be!

http://watching-bingley-birds.blogspot.com/2015/01/nesting-moorhens.html

Another citizen exercising Second Amendment rights to prevent violent crime...I would've given this clerk more points for having grabbed scumbag by the hair, since the clerk had time to creep up behind him and was not alone and could (in an ideal world) have counted on the other clerk to help subdue him without hurting him, and it's such tempting hair anyway, but y'hafta do what works. (And, fashion tip: if you want to have eye-catching long hair, avoid hostile confrontations.)

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/15/robbery-suspect-was-paying-so-much-attention-to-clerk-that-he-didnt-realize-what-was-sneaking-up-behind-him/?

Phil Robertson doesn't need a boost from this web site, but he happens to be right. I can see why some of The Nephews are fans of his.

http://www.bizpacreview.com/2015/01/16/phil-robertson-knows-why-radical-islam-is-winning-weve-lost-jesus-as-a-nation-172968

Mini-biographies of well-known Socialists:

http://freedomfightersofamerica.blogspot.com/2015/01/socialism-around-world.html?

In view of the above, I wouldn't expect to find myself supporting anything called "The Mexican Chapter of the Permanent People's Tribunal." But, just like Mr. Robertson, they happen to be right.
Long live Mexico, and in order to live long (and enjoy it) they should ban GMO corn.

http://www.naturalnews.com/048312_genetically_modified_corn_GMO_ban_Mexico.html

Would you eat this thing? Freshwater trout...lots of mercury built up in its superabundant flesh. But you have to see it, anyway.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/15/man-catches-what-would-have-been-the-largest-fish-of-its-kind-in-state-history-until-he-had-to-throw-it-back/?

Funnily enough, in this collection of quotes from Martin Luther King I found a pair that seemed to speak to the life of a penniless writer. Can other people spot them, too? Or is my finding them just an example of how the human mind projects its own concerns onto everything it perceives?

http://booktrib.com/2015/01/12-martin-luther-king-jr-quotes-that-are-amazingly-appropriate-for-our-time/

Amputee controls robotic arms with his brain alone? I'd like to recommend this page, shared by Ashton Kutcher, no less, to Right Hand Man...but I have to warn you that it's on an incredibly annoying web site that may mess up your computer.

http://aplus.com/a/bionic-arms-man-jhu

Some writers have too many ideas, and some writers are generous with them...

http://www.writingcreatively.org/2015/01/writer-wake-up.html

This idea is definitely not a fun read, but useful information.

http://helpforsingleparents.blogspot.com/2015/01/left-to-die-stories-of-alcohol.html

When I'm particularly aware of the multiple injustices in life, I have a natural tendency to ignore other people's troubles.

http://www.personapaper.com/article/15717-when-life-is-not-fair

If you've not walked four miles yet today (that's how far I walked before and after connecting with a car pool this morning), or even if you have, you might enjoy this beautiful nature walk in Washington state with Vicki Green:

http://border-collies-in-the-burbs.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-winter-hike-on-little-si-trail.html

Ruth Cox shared a pretty picture...on a blog post, or on a body pillow you can actually buy.

http://abitosunshine.blogspot.com/2015/01/sunset-silence.html

I want this T-shirt!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/+LLReynolds/albums/6105536962763265505/6105536962078714226?pid=6105536962078714226&oid=100464596219726743506

It's hard to ask them, when they're almost thirty miles away, but I think the Cat Sanctuary cats would say "purr" to Lyn Lomasi's post:

http://www.pawsitiveparenting.com/supermom-kind-of/-why-am-i-always-helping-too-many-animals

Whew. I'm stopping now, whether any more plus-worthy links float in or not.

Book Review: Prozac Nation

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Prozac Nation

      
Author:  Elizabeth Wurtzel

      
Date: 1994, 1995

      
Publisher: Riverhead / Penguin

      
ISBN: 1-57322-512-6

      
Length: 368 pages

      
Quote: “Could family dynamics possibly account for all this trouble? Was my brain chemistry part of the prob­lem too?”

      
Elizabeth Wurtzel defines herself as depressed. In an afterword in the paperback edition, she says, “I hated...being in­troduced or described as ‘the author of the controversial book,’ because Prozac Nation is, as far as I’m concerned, a memoir with no particular thesis or point.”

      
Some readers might have replied, “Baloney,” because Wurtzel’s previous potboiler appeared under the title Bi*ch, and Prozac Nation is full of words that would snag “family filter” software too, and if you don’t want a book to be described as “controversial” the first thing you do is remove all the family-filter-activating words. Randomly open Prozac Nation five times: page 28, “Hell” appears without a capital letter or any mention of Michigan; page 83, “dope,” twice, as an insult to an individual without a chemical reference; page 140, one unchristian reference to Jesus and four F-words; page 239, one blasphemous reference to God and another F-word; page 335, another “Hell” that’s not the town in Michigan. There may be two consecutive pages in this book that wouldn’t activate the family filter, but I couldn’t guess where...and she’s not trying to be controversial?

      
“Controversial” gets attention, and although it’s classier for those Internet writers who are literally paid per view to find fresher controversies, to write about the choice not to get a flu shot or the merit of some old obscure book the library discarded after it had been untouched for thirty years, the facts in Prozac Nation are in fact controversial. We have no choice but to believe that what Wurtzel’s telling us—she felt miserable, annoyed the daylights out of people, hounded her boyfriend until he dumped her and then refused to get over him, and at the time of writing, although it’s not been long enough for her to explain how, Prozac seems to be helping her feel better—but there’s plenty of room for debate about what she’s left out.

      
Wurtzel offers that perhaps the controversial part is the question of whether someone in her early twenties is entitled to publish a memoir. Bah. At any age when a person is able to write a medical memoir, that history can be useful, at least to medical science.

      
I think the controversial part is the way Wurtzel’s depressive memories read like things the rest of us can relate to. There’s a line between her mood swings and the rest of ours; it’s not easy to say where that line is.

      
For myself, I’ll say that whenever I have dreaded morning and really felt too lousy to get out of bed, an identifiable disease process has always been involved...and yet, while I was an undiagnosed celiac, eating whole wheat because if my colon was spastic with all this healthy wheat in it I didn’t want to imagine how I’d feel without it, it was also possible for fair-minded observers to observe that I had an awful lot of identifiable disease processes going on, and most of them weren't serious enough to justify missing school or work. Maybe (according to late twentieth century thinking) my brain was unconsciously telling my immune system to let all these infections immobilize me, because I enjoyed solitude, which was probably evidence of a fundamentally depressive personality, because according to late twentieth century thinking an introvert was simply a depressed extrovert. My real-world observation was that the only time I felt emotional pain, all by itself without reference to bowel function, was during the months when I was passing for an extrovert, but late twentieth century thinking was closed to this idea until about 1990.



In 1985 I decided to add a B.S. in psychology to a B.A. in English, because I was already helping people through all kinds of emotional crises. I knew that the mood swings of real mental patients were more complicated than those of college students, but I figured they probably had physical causes too, and who knew what a naturopathic approach might not do...this was the year when even schizophrenia seemed to be responding to vitamins.

I never got the B.S. in psychology, or even the B.A. in English. Psychological counselling went out of style. I found other day jobs. I went on reading psychology, though. I know why my emotions don’t reach mood-disorder proportions; I have some guesses why Wurtzel’s did, and “fluoxetine deficiency” is not a prime suspect. I have a guess that, if I’d been living in Wurtzel’s body and lifestyle, I would have been depressed in some way similar to her way. I have a guess that, if Wurtzel were to adopt my drug-free lifestyle now, after all those drugs, she’d feel much, much worse...but I still have to raise some questions about all the things Wurtzel apparently never tried while she was trying alcohol, XTC, cocaine, lithium, Mellaril, Prozac, and other dangerous chemical sources of temporary relief:

      
1. Exercise. Wurtzel lives mostly in New York , travels only to other grossly overcrowded cities in the course of Prozac Nation, doesn’t mention any outdoor activity. She does mention how much she liked sex. Could this have been partly  because sex was the only aerobic activity she was giving herself?

      
2. Quality time alone each day.(Not to be confused with naps.)

      
3. Sleep...when it's dark outside.

      
4. Food and/or chemical sensitivities. 

      
5. Sugar and simple carbohydrates. (I would urge any young person who identifies with Wurtzel to read Kathleen Desmaisons’ Potatoes Not Prozac.)

      
6. Mold and dampness. Humans rarely get aspergillosis, but often develop candidiasis.

       
7. Hormone imbalances are part of a physical condition that may get worse, and cause worse problems than depression. See It's My Ovaries.

8. Toxic beliefs from your cultural heritage. Like the one about women not being meant to be achievers (duh). Or the various forms of “If you’re happy, people will resent you, or the gods will punish you; never show real pleasure in anything or anyone.” Or the one about “Mind-blowing sex proves that it’s True Love, so I can’t be happy without him/her no matter how poisonous the relationship is.” “Or the one about “Happiness is a duty, not a pleasure; feeling sad, angry, or even just tired has to be either a sin or a sickness.” Or the one about “Showing the way I really feel, even by the expression on my face, harms other people.” All of these are still common among several demographic groups in North America. Wurtzel mentions some specifically Jewish ideas of a kind that send some evangelical Protestants into rants on the theme of “If only you would convert to my religion...” I’m not going there, because my religion, as practiced by the body of believers, has been hijacked by its own toxic beliefs. We all have to come to terms with our own religious identities, ethnic identities, maybe even our demographic-generation identities, by finding ways to affirm what we have in common with others while discarding the toxic beliefs some of those others may have adopted.

       
9. Any drugs. Wurtzel documents that each legal or illegal drug provided only partial or temporary relief and left her more depressed after a year had passed. Potatoes Not Prozac provides a precise, concise chemical explanation of why many Prozac users get only partial relief from this drug, and how they need to phase out Prozac and replace it with a cheaper, safer, naturopathic approach.

      
In 1995, Wurtzel wrote that “a backlash of reports, mostly promulgated by the Church of Scientology , linked Prozac with incidents of suicide and murder." Peter Breggin was not working for the Church of Scientology. Neither was Joseph Glenmullen at Harvard Medical College. Large amounts of money have been spent to suppress these reports from the mass media; newspaper reports that someone who suddenly attacked strangers “had been seeing a psychiatrist for depression” were common in the early 1990s, but now this useful piece of information is likely to be censored even when known. Awareness that serotonin boosters like Prozac can produce horrific pseudomemories has, however, helped people like Lauren Slater, who’s written a book about living with her pseudomemories and even programming herself to generate pleasant ones. My opinion is that serotonin boosters should be used only in a hospital setting, and the first week of withdrawal from these semi-psychedelic drugs should also be monitored in a hospital setting...but those who do use Prozac should at least be prepared to enjoy any unexpected “trips” they find themselves taking.

      
10. Respect your temperament. Depressed extroverts may act like introverts; depressed introverts may act like extroverts. Neither introversion nor extroversion is the same thing as depression. Wurtzel doesn’t actually present evidence of a strong genetic predisposition to either temperament; writing as self-expression is typical of HSP introverts; writing commercially successful nonfiction is typical of people with good verbal skills and bills to pay, regardless of temperament. During the twentieth century the United States became a grossly unbalanced nation, valuing salesmanship over creativity, productivity, or character, and perceiving any of the hereditary introverted traits as weaknesses. In other times and places extroverts were at least equally as likely as introverts to get toxic messages like, “All that whirring about and useless chatter, no commitment to anything serious, no inner resources...something must be wrong with that child!”  We are who we are. I personally feel that extroverts are obnoxious, but respecting what you are is the first step toward developing the respect for others as they are that extroverts so annoyingly lack.

      
11. Beware of too much attention to emotions. Bogging down in any thought process that begins with “How do I feel about myself today?” is likely to lead to discouraging navel-gazing, rather than purposeful activity.

12. Not taking mood swings too seriously. If mood swings seem to go beyond what’s appropriate in the situation, bearing in mind that it’s normal to cry at funerals and hit back if you’ve been hit and so on, that’s something to take seriously. Heed the feeling; listen to what your body is trying to tell you. All people who chronically feel sick and tired are sick, but usually the sickness is something as easy to cure as lack of rest or up-and-down blood sugar.



So my conclusion, after reading Prozac Nation, is still opposite to Wurtzel's. I still think any drug that causes even one out of a hundred users to become violently insane and start killing strangers, without warning, should be hard to get. It is helpful to know that her suicidal depressions had started by “the year I turned twelve,” when she overdosed on allergy pills while “trying to be not me for a little bit.” She insists over and over that her parents’ divorce and her mother’s hyperthyroid personality weren’t the primary cause of her depression, that even the break-up with the boyfriend merely aggravated something that had started at or before puberty. If there are people who need to medicate depression, rather than listening to depression and using it to help solve an underlying problem, this is the kind of history they’d have; this is what to look for before we risk hexing anyone by labelling him or her “depressive.” Wurtzel grumbles about having to spend “over a decade in a prolonged state of clinical despair” before being medicated. I believe that, for the good of all people who are and are not depressed, this should be necessary.

      
I believe that, for most people who are depressed, very likely including Wurtzel, the decade of despair would not be necessary. Along with “Let’s just talk about your parents’ divorce and see what you’ve learned about relationships so far,” bright young things like Wurtzel should also get, “Did you want to die, or did you just want to rest? Could you sleep better if you got more exercise?” (That’s still the first thing they’d get from me.) And, “What did you eat on the day when you felt so bad, and the day before that? Keep a food journal and see whether you can find any patterns.” And, “According to one interesting study, what a large group of young people who seemed to have everything, who were depressed, had in common was that their I.Q. scores were low relative to the standards for the kind of jobs their friends and relatives were doing. One wouldn’t expect a person in that category to get into Harvard, but is it possible that you’d be happier at a community college? Is journalism what you’ve always wanted to do, or would you have just as much fun chatting with the customers as a hairdresser or bus driver?”

      
And, “Do you take birth control pills? If that were what it took for you to feel better, could you stick to manual and oral sex only until you want a baby? If you really enjoy sex all that much, what do you think you might learn from a month or two of abstinence? Is it possible that, even if you’re consciously opposed to the ideals of abstinence, chastity, or waiting for marriage, you unconsciously respect those ideals more than you’ve been admitting?” (Wurtzel describes her spontaneous abortion on pages 186 to...well, the emotional impact of it goes on and on...there’s an interesting mental swerve around the primary subject matter of the novel Surfacing on page 228.) Since Prozac reduces the sex drive of a majority of patients, there’s even a possibility that the drug’s benefits for Wurtzel include relief from an emotional conflict between the counterproductive ideas of two of the cultural influences on her, though she doesn’t discuss this.

      
And, “Although we’ve learned by now that raging rarely helps people (even if they are physically strong enough to feel good while yelling at people), we’ve also learned that using anger to make changes, by sharing complaints and building strategies to oppose things that harm us, is a very good thing. Although you don’t have to shout unless you really want to, what are the things you could do without, and what are you doing about them?”

      
I’m glad Prozac helped Wurtzel, but I recommend reading the 1995 edition, which admits that Prozac didn’t actually cure her (she was hospitalized for a suicide attempt in between editions). The conclusion of Prozac Nation is that even effective antidepressant medication is a good analogy to a Band-Aid for a broken bone. If a small splinter of bone has made a Band-Aid-sized wound in the skin, then a Band-Aid can be said to help the patient with the broken bone...about as much as Prozac was helping Wurtzel.


Whew. Apart from that, what can be said about Prozac Nation as a book? Wurtzel's story is interesting because she's a talented writer; the story is well enough told to keep plenty of people reading all those pages about the depressive-girl experience. If you're a late baby-boomer or part of the next generation, you can relate to it. Prozac Nation is definitely Adult Content all the way, with those formerly unprintable words to qualify even the childhood memories as "adult," but it's the kind of Adult Content that's more likely to evoke sympathy, empathy, or pity than to upset most adults. It should probably be kept out of the reach of children...whether it's too embarrassing to store in a house occupied by teenagers is an individual judgment call. I don't mind letting The Nephews know I read it but some aunts might not want to share that information with their nephews.


If you're looking for a cheerful, inspirational read, or one that offers more solutions to your or your friend's depressive issues than "I've been there and not found a way out," you might want to consider reading one of those books by doctors mentioned in this review. All of them are more cheerful and more likely to work for a lot of people.


If you're interested in a very frank, very plausible, even publicly verifiable, memoir about what it's like to be depressive enough to need Prozac and what it's like when Prozac lets you down, Prozac Nation is for you, and you may buy it here as a Fair Trade Book. If you send $5 for the book + $5 for shipping, not only can you consolidate shipping charges for as many other things as can be shipped in the same package, but I'll even send you a copy in better condition than the one I'm offering cheaper to those who shop locally. And, out of this $10, Wurtzel or a charity of her choice receives $1.

Link Log for January 16

(Micro) Link Log for January 16


(This will be short because I have time to open only two friends' links today...) First, an e-friend warmly recommends a set of books I also recommend.


http://marshasspot.blogspot.com/2015/01/frugal-friday-with-marsha-tightwad.html


Next, a favorite author offers an engineering perspective on recent international events. Without taking sides on foreign policy, I can say this is an interesting insight into the engineering mind:


http://blog.dilbert.com/post/108258178221/how-do-you-know-when-something-is-working

Book Review: Nobody Nowhere

A Fair Trade Book 

Title: Nobody Nowhere

        

Author: Donna Williams

Author's web page: http://www.donnawilliams.net/

        

Date: 1992

        

Publisher: Times / Avon

        

ISBN: 0-380-72217-8

        

Length: 219 pages

        

Illustrations: black & white photo insert

        

Quote: “[M]y symptoms may have been due to a lack of vitamins but that this deficiency may have been a problem of absorption.”

        

Many people think of an “autistic spectrum” on which autism seems to be an exaggeration of a normal personality trait. My best guess is that this will prove to have been misleading; autism has no functional aspects and, when and as it seems to be cured, does not necessarily reveal an artistic or creative personality. Rather, I suspect, autism will prove simply to be a combination of symptoms produced by specific brain injuries, whether the damage was done by unalterable genetic syndromes, by physical injury, or (as in Donna Williams’ case) largely by hereditary sensitivities to foods, drugs, and toxins. Some autistic patients will respond “miraculously,” as Williams does in the course of her memoir, to identifying and removing the allergy/sensitivity triggers; for others, this may not be possible or even relevant. Most autistic patients won’t be curable. Some of those who are will be creative, perceptive introverts; others will be extroverts with no outstanding “gifts.” That’s a guess, for what it’s worth, and Nobody Nowhere is a memoir of autism that supports it.

        

While autistic, Williams seemed hopelessly incompetent, and one has to wonder how the people she knew ever let her try doing a job or living independently as an adult. Once cured, she’s reasonably intelligent, with massive learning deficits in some areas and moderate, not spectacular, talents in other areas (e.g. writing).

        

While autistic, she was hypersensitive to sensory stimulation, most of which was painful; she was placed on painkillers as a child (which probably aggravated her symptoms). Once cured, she’s sympathetic to autistic children, but not Highly Sensory-Perceptive. Even while autistic, although she describes perceptions being amplified in intensity, they’re not the unusually acute perceptions of true HSPs; Williams’ earliest memories involve unfocussing her eyes to see dust motes as “stars,” not focussing on finer details at greater distance than an average child.

        

While autistic, she was aware of other people and felt more interest in making friends than a typical young child, but was often aware of being alienated from people, both by her chronic pain and by her (apparently well conditioned) fear of abuse. Even while autistic, she was able to cultivate a “mask” personality that was shallow, often stupid, often “crazy,” but definitely energetic and outgoing. Once cured, she begins to experience her natural personality as extroverted.

        

It appears from Williams’ account that when her brain was functioning in a dysfunctional way, the language center was perhaps overstimulated while other parts of the brain were deprived of stimulation. Williams was verbose, even as what she recalls as being a “both autistic and retarded” child who could only babble while struggling to understand enough of the words she was mimicking to communicate. Once cured, this verbosity makes her quite a competent writer...for a “people person” whose main interest is not reading books or writing songs, but talking to people, especially to autistic children. She’s not a poet; she’s a talker who learned that some of her “autistic and retarded” phrasings were perceived by others as “poetic.”

        

I recommend anything by Donna Williams to American readers because of what I perceive as a dangerous misunderstanding. Here in the U.S. our best known dyslexic author (and behavioral scientist), Temple Grandin, does happen to be HSP. It’s easy for people who (a) aren’t HSP themselves, or (b) are both HSP and hypersensitive due to nerve and/or brain damage, or (c) know someone who is, to confuse healthy HSP “sensitivity” with dysfunctional hypersensitivity. There is in fact a fairly wide gap between the two traits, and Australian-born Donna Williams seems to me to be the best person on Earth to explain exactly what the difference is. 

        

If you have no really immediate interest in HSP, hypersensitivity, or autism, should you read Nobody Nowhere anyway? Certainly. It’s readable, vivid, entertaining, and it has that feel-good quality that hangs about all true stories of people who’ve overcome disabling diseases.

        

If you do have an immediate interest in hypersensitivity or autism, you’ve probably already discovered Donna Williams. There is just one caution for readers in this category. For Williams there was a simple cure that brought almost immediate relief from pain and slow steady progress toward normal brain function. For the person you’re concerned about, it’s more likely that there will be a simple cure for later-onset, more superficial hypersensitivity than for lifelong autism, but there’s no guarantee of any relief. A good diet-based treatment is worth trying; it may have a miraculous effect, may bring only partial relief, or may not work for your friend or relative at all.  There is no one specific diet that works even for all autistics who do have food intolerance; the grain-based diet that worked for Williams would not work for a gluten-intolerant autistic patient, and so on...and food-intolerant autistic patients often have food issues more complicated than gluten, lactose, or casein intolerance. All autistic patients and their families can at least try this approach, but only some will see a real cure.

Other Amazon Associates may offer it cheaper, but this is the only site where, if you pay $5 for a copy of Nobody Nowhere (plus $5 for shipping), we send Williams or a charity of her choice $1. 

Link Log for January 15

Well, I'm not going to finish what I was doing, because the computer center is closing early due to snow. Here's the Link Log...seems to be the most popular feature on the site these days.

There could be a better way to load a dishwasher...or, better still, when washing only enough dishes for a typical one-to-four-person meal, you could consider just washing them by hand. Saves time, money, energy, and avoids attracting pests to the dishwasher.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/15/tired-of-always-running-your-dishwasher-twice-study-suggests-there-could-be-a-better-way-to-load-it/?

Guest posts on Dilbert.com? The new site's worth checking out anyway. As indicated by my comments, it's working much better than the old one did.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/108099648551/a-new-dilbert-com

And here's an actual chortle...now, without the annoying pop-up ad!

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/108099102631/googles-20-policy

This rug was really only a mistake! No rugmaker was making a statement about police dogs, or other police policies, or procedures, or...oh right...

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/15/this-new-rug-sat-at-a-sheriffs-office-for-months-before-anyone-noticed-the-embarrassing-mistake-on-it/?

Interactive post by Elizabeth Barrette, likely to contain several inspiring stories by tomorrow morning.

http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/3542286.html

Drawing by Grace Ellen at

http://thesmittenedlife.blogspot.com/2015/01/death-and-dying.html

I "plus" Franklin Graham's politically incorrect message...but it is reported at The Blaze, a site that tends to attract raucous and sometimes obnoxious comments.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/14/rev-franklin-grahams-non-pc-move-on-live-tv-i-want-to-say-something-to-all-the-muslims-that-may-be-watching-this/?

James Haste makes a good point:

http://freedomfightersofamerica.blogspot.com/2015/01/skin.html?

Nice, simple, anybody-can-do-this quilt top:

http://marshasspot.blogspot.com/2015/01/wip-wednesday-11415.html

Yes, this link is mine, but I'd like everybody to notice it. Women can take the "electrician helper" class too; it's right up the alley of laid-off coal miners who've already learned about wiring lights inside a mine, and also tends to appeal to returning veterans, but M.E.C.C. classes are accessible to everybody. I'd be interested in taking the free class if I could join a car pool at least for the trip home.

http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2015/01/morgan-griffith-reaches-out-to-laid-off.html

Judy Gray Johnson, local author and beater of odds, whose first book I discussed here at length a few years ago, has published a new book called Resilience. Definitely one for the Wish List.

http://judygrayjohnson.com/

Not necessarily the favorite, but the most singable of a set of poems by Richard Rowell:

http://www.lifesuccessfully.com/creative-writing/blue-moon-poetry

Ten things our grandparents didn't do that we do all the time? Hmm. You might want to check...

http://www.homemade-by-jade.com/blog/10-things-our-grandparents-didnt-do

I do find that a machine dries laundry better than the humid air in my overforested part of the world. And likewise, around here, nature wastes more water than any household could ever manage to waste. Apart from that, I think I do all the things Homemade By Jade's grandparents did. (I know I have one of the smallest carbon footprints in America--maybe not the smallest, because I do use electricity. I'm not amused by cap-and-trade garbage-talk about my wood-and-garbage-burning stove.)

Surprisingly, although their most active time is sundown, most cats' next most active time is sunup. They can be good alarm clocks if allowed to be. Or, if you need to work late, you can train either dogs or cats not to wake you too early...

http://www.dogpawsitivetidbits.com/2015/01/not-morning-dog-person.html

Sometimes an image can be distracting. I clicked on this page because it contains an excellent quote, looked at the image of Ronald Reagan doing a prune face, found myself wanting to comment "If only my hair would look like that at age 70...rather than right now."

http://rightwingart.com/f03abcdf-3279-4f51-828f-5a3c7f07b63d/artupload.aspx

So here's another link to the same photographer's page. (I seriously believe that, when college girls start wearing head scarves and shawls for reasons other than warmth, they do think they look fat. Or blotchy, or whatever other thing they don't like about their hair or skin.)

http://rightwingart.com/b99f9529-20dd-4197-a509-e5d1d19e9003/artupload.aspx

Serious thought for today...I'm pretty sure this web site has mentioned the often overlooked fact that the Bible's prescriptions for criminal justice were often much less harsh than ours. (Hat tip to the late Charles Colson, and the late Sheldon Emry, for preaching this idea when I was a little baby Bible Maven in my early teens.) Rand Paul and Cory Booker are taking up this idea.

http://www.freedomworks.org/content/give-nonviolent-offenders-chance-redemption

If you watch "Downton Abbey," are you interested in the books mentioned on the show? I don't watch TV; I'm fractionally more interested (more than zero) in watching a show that mentions these books:

http://www.abaa.org/blog/post/the-books-of-downton-abbey

Book Review: Suffering Into Joy

Book Review: Suffering into Joy

        

Author:  Eileen and Kathleen Egan

        

Date: 1994

        

Publisher: Servant Publications

        

ISBN: 0-89283-876-0

        

Length: 156 pages

        

Quote: “Everyone is Jesus in a dis­tressing disguise.”

        

In the 1970s, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was the subject of a very popular book, Something Beautiful for God. In the 1980s, a short documentary movie was released about her work. In the 1990s, after a medical study reported that merely watching the movie boosted many people’s immune function (as measured by blood tests), the Egan sisters wrote this short book, containing as many direct quotes as possible from an old nun who never wrote a book and whose native language wasn’t English. Suffering into Joy may have been calculated to promote a traditional Roman Catholic view of Teresa of Calcutta as a saint.

        

Christians understand the biblical word “saint” in a variety of ways. I remember the mild shock, after being baptized at sixteen, of being in a group of newly baptized Protestants and having a minister address us as “saints.” His idea was that the words sanctus and hagios were used in the Bible to refer to people who were still alive at the time of writing. The words translated as “saint” meant any person dedicated to some religious purpose; in the Bible they referred to people who either were still alive, or hadn’t been dead very long. The idea of actually praying to people who had been dead a long time, who were remembered as especially “saintly,” came later and was rejected by most Protestants.

        

I mention this so that readers can share my appreciation of the irony: the people who most firmly resist the idea of praying to the saints of the Catholic Church are the ones who would have to agree that, beyond all question, Teresa of Calcutta was a saint. Early in life she took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and dedicated her whole adult career to nursing the sickest, filthiest, most hopeless patients she could find. It’s hard to imagine that her intentions were not passively suicidal, but, as the whole world now knows, she did not catch a fatal infection and die quickly. She went on bathing and cleaning people with deadly diseases for more than sixty years. Considering that she started doing this before antibiotics had been invented, it’s hard to doubt that something beyond the ordinary emotional “high” of doing good deeds was protecting her.

        

That said, it must also be acknowledged that some of her best-known speeches, quoted in this book, sound unbearably smarmy. Repeated by anyone who is not indisputably a saint, they don’t even inspire any reaction more noble than an immediate application of Duct Tape Therapy. Since Teresa was (a) a saint, (b) foreign, and (c) a tiny, stooped old lady by the time most of us heard of her, people gave her a free pass...but I don’t recommend that anyone else try to repeat phrases like “pain is Jesus kissing you” in any mood or situation. It ties into Indian culture and should probably never have been uttered in English. Jesus was the kind of man children were always tagging after, tugging on, asking for a story; this does not happen to the kind of man whose kisses or touches cause pain.

        

“We must be able to radiate the joy of Christ,” she’s quoted as saying on page 38. “If our actions are just useful actions...our poor people would never be able to rise up to...the call to come closer to God...If we went to them with a sad face, we would only make them much more depressed.” I think this might have been a sane thing for Teresa of Calcutta to say in Calcutta, in the context of the reality that feeling sad or tired often means that your immune system is already burdened—you’re not fit to be around people with AIDS or leprosy. And these patients were “poor people” in every sense of the word. However, in most of the places where most of us are going to do any beautiful works for God of which we may be capable, I think this speech is misplaced and counterproductive.

        

Let me try to explain this from the perspective of someone who is “poor in America,” either less wealthy than other Americans, or to be pitied for some other reason such as bereavement. If what someone does for me as a person in material need is “just a useful action,” a genuinely useful action, and one that pays me enough respect to involve a fair exchange rather than trying to insult me with some suggestion of a handout from either side, I can’t guarantee that that’s going to bring me closer to God—God and I are the ones who would determine that—but I can say that it’s going to bring me closer to that person as a person. And anything anybody could do for me as a bereaved person would have to be done with, at best, a grave, serious face.

        

I’ve written about this before: I’m not opposed to smiles, or to out-loud laughter—much that I’ve written is meant to encourage laughter—but if you find yourself thinking about what your face is doing and telling yourself to smile, please stop now. A smile that someone forces onto his or her face in the belief that smiling is a duty, rather than a pleasure, is a sad thing to see. If you’re not carried away by joy or pleasure to the point where you’re unaware that you’re smiling, then you shouldn’t be smiling. Try a little honesty—it will lead to more genuine smiling and laughing, overall.

        

But back to Mother Teresa. What about her more levelheaded, human-to-human ideas? Well, here I go out on a limb again...I think that some of her extravagances are in fact what a Christian life is all about; what should actually be expected of all Christians. Not all of us are meant to be nurses in Calcutta. All of us who claim to be Christians are, however, called to function as the living body of Christ (see Teresa’s commentary on Galatians 2:20 on page 61 of Suffering into Joy).

        

I’m not so sure that nursing the dying is the best model for most of our ministries. (Not all Christians are meant to be ordained ministers in churches, but every Christian has a ministry...unfortunately most Christians don’t seem to know this.) On page 75 Mother Teresa is quoted as saying that poor people “are hun­gry not only for bread and rice, they are hungry...for you to know...that they want to be treated as you are treated.” To an American reading these words I would add: Do you honestly believe that that means “spoken to with a simper”? Is a pseudo-smile the kindest thing anyone has ever given you? What about a smarmy pseudo-endearment from a total stranger?

        

Christians are attracted to Christ because we want to “be givers,” but it’s too easy for us to buy into a wrongheaded way of doing it. Teresa of Calcutta couldn’t have been expected to imagine the warped attitude Christians in the United States have toward money and what we know of poverty—most of which she would have seen as luxury.

        

Teresa of Calcutta would probably have understood what I mean by saying that what she called “selflessness” is a benign illusion. In her very special situation, it seems obvious that she  must have felt a particular kind of joy—the intense joy that spreads through a healthy body when the immune system is successfully warding off diseases—on a regular basis, and that that joy was what she wanted in life. Most of us prefer other kinds of joy, and most of us don’t get her kind. (Many other missionaries died in Calcutta .) In any case, she was following her bliss.

        

Why can’t Big Government replicate this kind of joy on a bigger and more accessible scale? Given that most people, even most Sisters of Charity, wouldn’t survive sixty years or even sixty days of what Teresa went to Calcutta to do at the beginning, why can’t we just translate the old nun’s joy into a calmer, secularized way of feeling good by letting Big Government redistribute our national wealth? Maybe because, in any situation less melodramatic than Calcutta, attempts to copy Teresa’s heroic acts become histrionic, or even hysteric, rather than heroic. Maybe because when you institutionalize and professionalize and depersonalize anything, you lose the joy. Maybe because Big Government is not a saint who has devoted her or his individual life to channelling the spirit that was in Jesus. All I know for sure is that, during the twentieth century, nearly every country on earth experimented with some sort of Welfare State, and although countries like Sweden and the United States still seem to have some chance of surviving if we abort the experiment fast, no country that made the experiment has profited by it.

        

This is getting political, and I apologize to the memory of Mother Teresa, who was not political, but in my country the personal is political. I think Americans need to bear these political thoughts in mind when we reflect on this book. Teresa served people who were already paupers, disabled, dying; she didn’t make anyone a pauper. When able-bodied people stayed with the Missionaries of Charity, she put them to work. When she said, “What you can do is pray for us,” she was talking to individuals who were flat on their backs, barely strong enough to swallow water—not to a generation of young people who are being denied the basis of membership in adult society, the right to earn honest wages for honest work.

        

So, the little nun did something awesome, for God, for India, and for herself. Merely reading her story can do some people some measurable medical good. I recommend that everybody own a copy and read it every five or ten years. But I also recommend that we in the United States read it with more awareness of its historical context than many American readers have shown. If you want to serve the Highest Good of people who are not dying in gutters, you must never talk to them as if they were. Taking this beautiful book too much on its face value, in the United States, has done some of us harm rather than good.

Suffering Into Joy is not difficult to find. Mother Teresa no longer needs a dollar. Eileen Egan no longer needs a dollar. If Kathleen Egan needs a dollar, I'm not seeing evidence of it on the Internet. So, if you can get this book cheaper elsewhere online, or in real life, and send more money to the Missionaries of Charity, please feel free to do so. If you buy this book from me, it'll cost $5 + $5 for shipping it (anything else I can squeeze into the same package).