Morgan Griffith's Thanksgiving Message

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"

Households throughout the Ninth District, our greater commonwealth and the country are preparing for Thanksgiving.

Discussions are occurring over the method of cooking the Thanksgiving turkey and ensuring enough of the right food is available. The dining room table is organized for a feast, and maybe even a guest bedroom or couch is tidied up for incoming family.

On Sundays around Thanksgiving, it is customary to hear the hymn “We Gather Together” in churches.

The Christian song’s history is rooted in the Dutch war of liberation against the king of Spain. The Spanish were strong supporters of Roman Catholicism. The Spanish king was attempting to restrict the Protestant Dutch from exercising their faith and gathering at places of worship.

The Dutch were engulfed in years and years of battles.

In reference to the struggles of the Dutch people during this time, the hymn reads: “the wicked oppressing now cease from distressing...Let thy congregation escape tribulation.”

The hymn underscores the importance of community and faith centered around the Lord.

Meanwhile, people in England dealt with domestic problems of their own. Overpopulation with no room in the peerage for second, third and fourth sons, coupled with concerns of an overbearing government, caused people to reconsider their lifestyle options. Eager to improve their lives, the New World presented an opportunity for renewed fortune, promise and often religious freedom.

In 1607, the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown was founded in the colony of Virginia.

In 1619, others followed suit. That September, Captain John Woodlief and 36 men embarked on their own journey to Virginia. They battled stormy conditions sailing aboard the Good Ship Margaret from Bristol, England.

The wearied sailors and passengers arrived at their destination in December. They founded Berkeley Hundred, a settlement further up the James River from Jamestown.

Arrival at their colonial destination following the months-long journey became cause for celebration and prayer: “We ordain that this day of our ship's arrival … in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

While many children are taught in school that the Pilgrims held the very first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts two years later in 1621, Virginia is credited with being a foundational player in establishing the tradition, which is why I believe all the common Thanksgiving imagery is merely Massachusetts envy towards Virginia. The Berkeley tradition was celebrated annually until the community was destroyed in an Indian conflict. I should note the Massachusetts Pilgrims only celebrated their Thanksgiving feast once.

In his 1963 Thanksgiving Proclamation, President John F. Kennedy recognized Virginia’s role: “Over three centuries ago, our forefathers in Virginia and in Massachusetts, far from home in a lonely wilderness, set aside a time of thanksgiving. On the appointed day, they gave reverent thanks for their safety, for the health of their children, for the fertility of their fields, for the love which bound them together and for the faith which united them with their God.”

U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr. entered the story of the Virginia First Thanksgiving into the Congressional Record in 1969.

The modern annual Virginia Thanksgiving Festival at Berkeley Hundred, known better to some as Berkeley Plantation, pays homage to the contributions of Captain Woodlief and the original settlement. This year, the festival celebrated its 63^rd year commemorating America’s first Thanksgiving.

Berkeley Plantation also is the ancestral home of two U.S. presidents: 9^th President William Henry Harrison, which is where he was born, and 23^rd President Benjamin Harrison.

Aside from issuing proclamations, presidents engage in other customs around Thanksgiving time. One such custom is the pardoning of turkeys.

This practice allegedly stems from Abraham Lincoln. Legend holds it that Lincoln spared the life of a turkey at the behest of his son. Later presidents like Kennedy and Ronald Reagan held turkey pardon events before it became an annual tradition in 1989.

The National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation takes place at the White House. During the Obama and Trump Administrations, some of the pardoned turkeys ended up at Virginia Tech!

While I will not be granting any clemency to the turkey my wife cooks, I will be thanking God for all the blessings I have received.

In my house, like the Dutch and Captain Woodlief, we will gather together and place our trust and thanks in the Almighty.

No matter what your religious tradition is, I wish all a happy Thanksgiving!

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

Book Review: My Little Island Life

Title: My Little Island Life

Author: Alex Apostol

Date: 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Poetry: The Ever-Changing Who

If that church college I attended aimed to teach us anything, it was how to be missionaries, so in the first or second term everybody had to take a speech class. The teacher tried to make it more interesting and less intimidating by calling the course Interpersonal Communications and, on the theory that college freshmen are most interested in themselves, making the first speeches be in groups of three or four and the topic be "Who Am I?" 

Just the facts, as in the student directory, was my reaction to that assignment, but one kid in my group wanted to impress the teacher and gushed, "I am an ever-changing who!" 

I suppose I did participate in keeping the "Who" name and jokes going throughout our church college years. I thought that was a terribly amusing and thought-provoking line. 

"Who, who, who are you?"

"I am an ever-changing who.

Not one, but two,

Or perhaps a few."

"What, what, are you for real?"

"Depends on how I feel.

I can lie and cheat and steal

So long as innocent's how I feel.

Nothing but me can change it

On my ever-turning wheel."

"How, how, how is this?"

"Oh, the sublime, ineffable bliss

Of changing with the wind: that! to this!

There's not much I ever miss."

"How, how do youexplain that?"

"For eveyrone I have met,

I'm a new who, don't forget.

I've not stopped changing yet."

"The changing who, the changing who,

Never the same, but always new!

Change is the only constant for it.

Hebrews 13:8 would bore it.

Christ, ever different yet ever the same,

Died for this who. Who-m can He redeem?"

Feline Friday: Snow Before Frost

We hadn't seen frost yet at the Cat Sanctuary. This is very unusual; we usually get frost in the last week of September or first week of October, but this year it was as if Old Man Winter was feeling sorry for the people in North Carolina who are still living in tents. Day after day, the sunset came earlier and the sunrise later, but the temperatures stayed at mid-September (which is to say, from humans' point of view, perfect) with lots of sunshine.

This couldn't last as long as some people in North Carolina needed it to.

Earlier in the week I was near a TV set on which MSNBC was confidently saying that downtown Gate City would get "a trace" of snow, the Cat Sanctuary would get an inch, and the top of Clinch Mountain might get two or three or even four inches, because the ground temperature even on the lower ridges would be warm enough to melt snow. I had to smile. Weather forecasts have become much more detailed than they were fifty years ago, when it would have been "chance of snow," and by becoming more detailed they've remained often wrong. Local meteorologists make different guesses so that people can have favorites, but they're all often wrong. The Blue Ridge Mountains are where northern and southern weather patterns meet. It's always anybody's guess which weather pattern we'll actually get, except that rain will almost always be involved. 

I dug up blankets and shawls, brought in things that might freeze outside, and settled in for a day or two of rain. Not that I mind snow, as long as the computer works. 

So, early this morning, I was out on the screen porch putting the finishing touches on today's Link Log and assuring readers that a Petfinder post was forthcoming. And I had just scheduled the Link Log, hit "Publish," and reached to open a new tab with Petfinder in it, when all the lights went out and the heater stopped. About two inches of snow had fallen. Much of it had fallen directly on the ground and melted, but relatively mild temperatures only meant wetter, heavier snow clinging to trees. Somewhere there must have been one last dead tree that hadn't gone down in the Edge of the Hurricane. 

No use sitting on the screen porch if I wasn't computing, was there? So I went home to bed. No electricity there, either. I lay down under a blanket and had a nice nap. It was about time for one. I'd been up all night, sending out feelers about a novel and contending with Microsoft's endlessly annoying updates to a program I had not planned to open again in the foreseeable future. 

Then I woke up; the sun was bright, the house was chilly, the lights were still off. So the most useful thing to do was to come into town and report the power outage. 

Most of the snow had melted but even McDonald's was closed, due to the power outage, until one o'clock.

On days like these we think how much everyone loses by having "power grids," how badly we all need to be generating our own electricity instead of paying companies to build big, dirty "plants" and dams and abandon them ten years later.

Anyway, about the animals. In honor of the weather, can we find snowy or frosty white animal photos? I tend to neglect white animals because Petfinder's sorting mechanism does not separate animals with really white coats from animals with a white spot here and there. For both dogs and cats, the gene for just a few small white spots is dominant. More animals than not have a white spot somewhere, so a Petfinder search for white animal photos is almost the same thing as an unsorted search. Growlgrowlgrowl...

Zipcode 10101: Duchess and Glow from New York City

Duchess's web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/duchess-73161294/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/

They're spring kittens, rescued from different alleys. Like our Serena and Traveller, they recognized each other as the siblings they had been missing so badly for so long, and bonded on sight. Duchess is the white one. Both kittens are female. I'd be greatly surprised if Glow hadn't been spayed, too, but I didn't check. Duchess has been spayed. They should fill your house with bouncing and pouncing and racing and chasing for a few years. They are recommended for people who don't want shelves cluttered with breakable objects, who keep plants in heavy pots on the floor. The photo showing what a lapfull they've become by now caught Glow at the sort of angle MSNBC favors for Republican politicians, but at Duchess's web site there's another photo showing that Glow has a normal adorable kitten face too.

Zipcode 20202: Snow White from DC

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/snow-white-74015137/dc/washington/lucky-dog-animal-rescue-dc20/

Snow White is not a social cat. She's a rather small cat, her apparent bulk mostly fur, and likes to sit around posing and looking down on other animals. She's being sheltered in a foster home, where she reportedly doesn't acknowledge that other cats and dogs are there. She is thought to be about six years old, healthy, spayed, friendly with humans. 

She looks to me like the sort of would-be Queen Cat who'd sprint a mile if Serena looked at her, but she might do very well as an only pet.

Zipcode 30303: Polar Bear from Atlanta

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/polar-bear-73604965/ga/atlanta/pattys-kitties-ga1119/

Move fast! Polar Bear and his mother and four siblings will be on display at a shopping mall tomorrow! They're all pure white, though their coats may show silver or gold undertones in some lights. Not much is known about the kittens' individual purrsonalities; they'll probably develop some as they grow up. If you're in Atlanta you'll have a chance to meet them.

And now the dogs:

Zipcode 10101: Sinbad from Puerto Rico by way of New York City 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/sinbad-71679987/ny/new-york/miracles-for-satos-rescue-ny1518/

Remember Sinbad and Me? Kin Platt's bid to create an iconic dog character may have helped some real Old English Bulldogs find homes, but Sinbad here is believed to be mostly retriever. Nobody knows for sure. Anyway, somebody thought he looked like a dog who'd be the perfect baby-sitter and bodyguard for a teenaged boy and girl who fancied themselves detectives. Nobody knows for sure how well he'd do at that, either. Kin Platt's dog hero's competence, like his humans' adventures, had a hint of the supernatural. Retrievers are not usually as intelligent as herding dogs or terriers. 

This real-world Sinbad is five years old and weighs fifty pounds, and they want $550 for him. That's to include transportation from Puerto Rico to New York or New Jersey. If you can meet him in Puerto Rico the adoption fee should be more reasonable. 

He is described as a well-meaning, lovable pet, but almost completely uneducated. He belonged to people who just tied him to the fence to be a watchdog--in one case, while they moved up to the mainland! Then he was rescued by someone who lived with a bunch of other dogs, and they chased him back onto the street. For his size he seemed surprisingly afraid of the street; it was a new experience in his short unsatisfying life. He is said to be very demonstrative of gratitude for a foster home where he has a chance to lead a normal dog's life, with walks and runs and suchlike. He would probably love to run at the heels or the bicycle wheels of a teenager, but he's big and rambunctious enough to intimidate a small child. 

For a large dog he's getting on in years, but he's still full of pent-up energy from his misunderstood puppyhood. Ask about adopting this dog only if you are serious about fitness. He'll provide all the workouts you need to maintain a good figure.

Zipcode 20202: Cotton Ball from South Carolina 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/cotton-ball-73742063/dc/washington/final-victory-animal-rescue-sc497/

She's just a spring puppy. Readers who've watched Dave Paulides' Missing Persons Project videos will remember Executive Producer Huck, the big fluffy pale-colored dog Paulides usually pets and calls a good girl at the opening of each video. Huck is a Great Pyrenees dog. Cotton Ball is a Great Pyrenees puppy.

Cotton Ball (and a sibling called Q Tip) were typical shelter pups: nice, cute, well-meaning dogs dumped out of the homes of humans who didn't want puppies and couldn't find the time to have their dogs fixed so that puppies wouldn't arrive. This web site is not fanatical about neutering pets because all of us hate that "any domestic animals are too many, people must be herded into tiny apartments so that the population can keep on exploding and the Social Security Ponzi scheme can keep rolling" mentality behind the chant that "Neuter and spay is the only way." We are, however, very judgmental about people who don't make the time to have simple operations done and then dump out their unwanted puppies or kittens. If you want your dog to be a natural unaltered animal, you need to plan on giving her pups a loving home until your friends claim them. 

Well, Cotton Ball is already spayed, so no worries about that. She is very large for a nine-month-old puppy because she's probably going to be an oversized dog. Oversized dogs need a lot of food, a large doghouse (or just give them a whole shed), at least one positively athletic person who can run at big-dog speed, at least one person who is big and strong enough to lift them if necessary, and a large yard with probably an eight-foot fence. That is why they tend to be put in shelters. For people who can supply what they need, extra-large dogs can be great pets. Their worst quality is that they don't live as long as smaller dogs and cats do. They can live ten years, but, realistically, they're senior dogs at age five.

If you have what it takes to adopt a big dog, visit Cotton Ball's web page to work out where in DC, SC, or any point between would be best for you to meet her. 

Zipcode 30303: Athena from Atlanta 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/athena-37912470/ga/atlanta/ginny-millner-rescue-group-ga652/

Lazy people should not adopt Australian Shepherd puppies. These beautiful, photogenic dogs make good pets for people who want to stay slim and fit with lots of walks and adventures, and a large yard with a high fence. Athena unfortunately got stuck with lazy humans who didn't teach her anything, and she is yappy and excitable and hard to manage. They recommend not taking her to dog parks. If you can be a kind, firm, responsible trainer, this six-year-old, 65-pound dog might still learn to walk around town on a leash, eventually. She has languished in shelters longer than any dog should, but they say she's still a well-meaning dog, just excitable and uneducated. She likes running and playing and catching balls, and would probably be good at a responsible dog job if offered one. She should probably be an only pet.

Visit Scenic North Carolina

This is Noah. His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/noah-73887722/nc/burnsville/yancey-humane-society-nc08/

Noah is currently in the Burnsville shelter, on the North Carolina - Tennessee border, which has very reasonable adoption fees. He is thought to be young, and has been vaccinated. That's all they're saying.

And this is Loki. His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/loki-73358834/tn/johnson-city/tiny-miracles-kitten-rescue-tn1004/

Nobody calls anything Loki unless they expect it to play lots of tricks, some more fun than others. In the Old Norse legends, Loki started out as an amusing younger brother whose pranks made everyone laugh, but eventually he created so much ill feeling that he was cast out of the family. If you want to live with kitten pranks like pushing china plates off shelves or bounding across a perfectly decorated cake, this may be your kitten. 

I've said less about people losing homes in contiguous States, too, because the unprecedented flood in Asheville did so much damage, but the hurricane itself did abundant damage in Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia too. If you're going to be a hurricane tourist, Johnson City is not far out of the way from North Carolina. 

(Four billion dollars' worth of damage in Virginia? Well, yes, we did lose some bridges, and people could easily have lost houses to the Edge, but I hope we don't have any people in Virginia who are mean enough to inflate claims and thereby take money away from people who are still living in tents.)

Web Log for 11.20-21.24

For about twelve hours between 11.20.24 and 11.21.24 the computer was only technically running, working at about one-tenth of normal operating speed and crashing five or six times, due to NASTY MICROSOFT RUNNING UNWANTED UPDATES TO DISGUSTING EDGE, WHICH I NEVER USE. I think we need a law. If people are paying for computers, for Internet connections, for electricity, for office space, then they should be the sole decision makers about what their computers do. If Microsoft employees want to play with computers, they should get their own.

I do think the Internet has grown to a point of needing regulation, and, off the top of my head, here are fifteen regulations I think it needs: 

(1) any device that connects to the Internet should be considered a computer, 

(2) all computers must be sold with keyboards, 

(3) all computers must be sold with printers to which they are connected by simple cables without depending on phone or Internet connections, 

(4) no matter how much people enjoy listening to music when they are alone with their computers, the default setting for all computers must be completely silent, 

(5) although computer owners have a right to change the programs they use, all programs (software, apps) that are sold to the public must come with printed operating instructions that are not subject to change, 

(6) interruption of Internet connection time for which someone other than the source of the interruption is paying IS THEFT AND THE INTERRUPTER MUST BE MADE TO PAY THE VICTIM OR GO TO PRISON, 

(7) all computers must be functional in completely Internet-free mode, 

(8) attempts to hybridize computers with old-style telephones have been rejected because they were dysfunctional and so the default assumption for all businesses and government offices shall be that people no longer use phones, 

(9) people cannot be required to use e-mail, either, which means that you can't "reach" a person to interrupt what the person is doing at your leisure, so deal with it, 

(10) unless online money-handling services agree to process payments promptly, anonymously, without trying to monitor who is paying whom for what in any way unless a warrant for a criminal investigation has been served, the default assumption for all participants in paid transaction shall be that payments must be made by US postal money orders, 

(11) all computers must be programmed to obey input from their keyboards first, from participants in interactions initiated from their keyboards second, and from third parties only (a) with a warrant for a criminal  investigation or (b) for strictly regulated, statistical, anonymous, data gathering purposes WHEN THE COMPUTER IS NOT IN USE BY ITS OWNER, 

(12) devices sold for uses other than computing may be sold with computers built into them if sold with keyboards and printers, but must be fully operational with those computers disabled or removed, 

(13) any transaction that requires positive identification of any individual must take place offline, 

(14) computers that connect to the Internet must not be allowed to store government identification numbers or phone numbers or any sequence of digits that could be either of those, and 

(15) however much some people may enjoy moving pictures, no image on a computer screen may be allowed to move until it is activated by a command from the keyboard. 

Anyway, I don't do the Petfinder posts in advance, so here it is Friday and (at the time of writing) I don't have one done yet. On that job now...

Cartoon

After that post about the righteousness of being baby-free, let's mention that mothers of small children are superheroines. Fan art from Joe Jackson:

...whose Calvin & Hobbes fan art I love, but whose Archie Comics fan art isn't even funny, just a matter of imagining the teenybopper characters acting out the fantasies most real teenyboppers are too shy to act out. We all know that Archie and Betty and Veronica may have dreams like JJ's cartoons at night, but in the daytime they think about each other, like, "Of course the good-night kiss lasts three seconds, max! What kind of girl/fellow do I want Archie/Betty to think I am?!" 

And thus be it ever. Part of being a teenager is thinking you want to rush ahead and be an adult, but being a teenager is fun in its own way. Free money to go with a friend you will kiss good night for three seconds, max, to the ball game. Free admission to cultural events that cost adults a hundred dollars per person. Teenagers really ought to enjoy it while they can; adulthood lasts long enough. 

Cute Things

I was going around the house pulling down storm windows. The house now has modern screen-and-storm windows, built in one piece; you can push up the screen or the storm window, or pull both down. Halfway inside the screen, in one window, was Johnny Wren, clearly preparing to snuggle down for the night in a dummy nest he made a few summers ago, using oak catkins and moss. It was thick, soft, airy dried plant material and would probably have added some insulating value to his feathers, which have not been receiving natural prompts to grow any extra down.

And here came this great horrid human and tilted his lovely cozy nest out of place! Johnny Wren was very indignant. He has one audible "word" to express dissatisfaction. If I spell it "rasp" you'll probably know the sound I mean. He said "rasp" over and over, with different phrasings and emphases, for a good three minutes.

"Dee dee dee," said a chickadee who had joined a mixed flock with Johnny for the winter. It sounded as if he were agreeing and commiserating. Johnny Wren appeared to think he was. 

This was about 5:30 p.m. Normally the flock would be asleep by now. But still, as the clock ticks closer to 8 p.m.: 

"Rasp rasp rasp rasp RASP rasp." Johnny Wren still has more pieces of his mind to give me.

"Dee dee dee." Maybe the chickadee is still agreeing. Maybe he's trying to tell Johnny Wren to be quiet so he can sleep.

"Peep, cheep." Another small bird is heard from. Maybe they're discussing the weather, and whether they should fly further south.

Photo from the American Bird Conservancy. Actually their wren is probably singing, with his beak open; they don't have to open the beak to rasp. But it looks to humans as if it might be complaining..

Gift Ideas

Election-related e-mail tends to be icky, but post-election begging? From a rich person to non-rich people? The claim being made is that Candidate Kennedy was very unfairly forced to pay his own guards during the election. Say what? He wouldn't have been paying them already? But selling merch as a fundraiser is an option I respect. Here is where to buy hats, T-shirts, and tote bags. I am most likely to wear black, red, or teal. 

https://merch.mahanow.org/collections/make-america-healthy-again 

Health 

For those who would rather sit through a lo-o-o-o-ong video, more than two hours, than read books like Back to Eden, McDougall's Medicine, Maximum Metabolism and others recommended here? Here's a very California-style, Cliff's Notes version where Tucker Carlson talks to two of the rising generation of health food pundits. 

Is healthy eating complicated? Oh no, the little darlings answer earnestly. The AMA and the FDA have made it sound complicated so that people won't cure their own health problems...

Wait'll you've worked in a health care job for a few years, dears. Or developed a complicated health problem, yourselves. Granted, the more real natural food in proportion to overprocessed chemical junk, generally, the better. But every rule has its exception. Some things have to be highly processed to become foods, like the acorns that were a big part of indigenous Californians' diet. Soda pop often seems like the quintessence of junkfood, but not many years ago, when almost all foods were contaminated with glyphosate, soda pop was an important source of calories in my mostly chickweed diet. Because soda pop has had all the fibre and nutrients processed out of any fruit flavoring it may contain, it was one thing that didn't make me sick. 

It can be easy for those of us who've found healing in a special diet to become preachy, which is the worst thing we can do for our cause. Food nannying is more toxic than junkfood is. Tell me what's helped you by all means, but understand that what's helped you might not help me. 

The Bright Young Things think they understand PCOS. I'm not so sure. I will say this, though. When I learned that a friend and I had it, allopathic drugs weren't being offered for it. Birth control pills were. I thought they might unbalance my hormones even more. Anyway my symptoms weren't painful and I didn't want to give birth. But if I could go back, and try a few weeks of a high-fat diet, always assuming that that sort of meals would stay down, and become pregnant and give birth...I wouldn't do it. There are enough babies on this planet; enough of them look like me. I've always been glad Nature spared me from being tempted to do something I would probably have regretted. I seriously believe that the first thing we need to do about our "epidemic of sterility" is recognize that, while sterility can be an effect of disease conditions people want to change, sterility in otherwise healthy people is a blessing, really, by far the mildest of nature's correctives. We have a serious overpopulation problem, /We need to recognize that, when the human population is exploding into "billions," the biggest problem with simple infertility is people's seeing it as a problem. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8456&v=mUH4Co2wE-I

Psychology 

Resentment of those perceived as better off can take strange forms. Chris Queen is receiving wails that mentioning the seasons in the US and UK "excludes" people in Australia and New Zealand. That reminds me of a Canadian reader's comment on an Associated Content post that referred readers to "your State" web site, "I am Canadian as you know." Yes, I did know. Associated Content was enough of a community that people could reasonably expect the writers they followed to remember where their hundred or two hundred most loyal readers lived. And I would have thought that, just as US readers would naturally compare their State's web site to the one I was citing for Tennessee, that particular Canadian reader ought to have been able to translate "State" to "province" and think, if the reader's province did not have an analogous page, that might be an opportunity to get paid for setting one up. 

It is fascinating that seasons work differently in different places, that in some places there's never snow for Christmas and, if snow falls at all, it's more likely to fall on the fourth of July. (Which, in those places, is probably not a holiday.) Previous generations of writers from the Southern Hemisphere were able to educate readers about this with style, verve, and charm, with stories that feature summertime Christmas parties and the oppressive heat of downtown Melbourne in February. Whining resentment is the new fashion...I prefer the older fashion, thanks. 

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/11/20/when-youre-planning-your-seasonal-events-dont-be-inconsiderate-like-mother-nature-n4934470

There happen to be more writers in the US. That won't change. We can try to remember to mention metric measurements, use different names for things if known, and at least explain if we insist on using some of the more alarming phrases in US slang. ("We killed the other school" means "We won the game, 65-0.") Beyond that, we expect international audiences to speak for themselves, tell us which side of the road they drive on and when and where they take vacations. US writers and readers tend to think the other English-speaking countries are charming and interesting, when their residents don't represent themselves to us as tiresome people.

Book Review: A Mate for Thanksgiving

Title: A Mate for Thanksgiving

Author: Erin Havoc

Date: 2022

Quote: "There's nothing to say. Just feel."

Right. That's the fantasy in this book. Woman accidentally runs over wolf on snowy road, tries to save his life, discovers that he's a werewolf and she likes him as a man. Mainly because he's always avoided humans and lived mostly as a wolf with his litter mates, he's not yet found a mate. (Wolves are believed to be as monogamous as dogs are not.) So they mate, as wolves do, and now they're Partners for Life. Right? Well...this pathetic woman believes her hormonal feelings are "love," so what they're going to do when she comes off heat, who knows. But it's a fantasy.

This is the sort of "romance" that can fairly be called porn. The last two or three chapters contain little but body parts. There's no pretense to redeeming social value, no attempt to develop the characters as anything but sets of bodies--perfect, of course, despite the wolf-man's recent injuries. Some person, or couple, was trying very very hard to describe either what worked for the person the night before, or what the person is sure would work for the person if a certain other person would only try it. I tend to suspect that the authors of straight-into-bed "romances" are all men writing under female pseudonyms, but who knows, maybe some of them are just nineteen years old. Read it if that sort of thing works as a marital aid for you. Destroy it before the children come in. I'll admit I skimmed through the bedroom scenes, as women do when we're not trying to get into The Mood, but my guess would be that they don't answer the kind of questions that are in teenagers' minds accurately, either.

Just don't ever take this kind of fantasy seriously in real life, because error'n havoc are what that would be and what it would wreak. Ask your friends who've tried it.

I'm surprised, though perhaps I shouldn't be, that this is what Kindle has to offer in the way of Thanksgiving stories, compared with all the Christmas and Halloween stories. Come to that, I don't think I've ever seen a novel advertise that its characters fall in love on Veterans Day, either, or New Year's Day or the Day of the First Snow. Romance writers are leaving lots of potential markets unexploited.  

Book Review: Sorceress for Hire

Title: Sorceress for Hire

Author: Sedigitus Swift

Date: 2023

ISBN: 978-1-961852-02-0 

Quote: "You want me to find a lost dog?"

This story has a moral: The most fascinating jobs one can fantasize about have their dull moments. Sinta was born with talent, has worked to train that talent, and is now "a powerful sorceress" in the magic, vaguely Europe-like, realm where the story is set. Enchanting the armoring of soldiers into an easy task is the kind of job she does. But some days, all that comes her way are requests to find lost dogs. She does that well, too.

She also defends persecuted peasants, rides into Thieves' Town to recover her stolen purse, and defeats an evil misogynist in a fair magical duel, in this volume. There will be more volumes. If you like fantasy adventures told with tongue firmly in cheek, you'll enjoy all of them.

(Though a character who declares that "Aunts are a scourge and a menace" is allowed to live. Fie!)

Hemileuca Rubridorsa

Going down the long list of Hemileuca species...H. pica, the Magpie Hemileuca, was recognized as the same thing as H. hera. H. proserpina is now considered just a variant form of H. maia. H. rickseckeri and H. rubra were both classified as variants of H. electra. Rubra, the Red Hemileuca, is a fairly conspicuous variation, and so is H. rubridorsa, which is still recognized as a distinct species.

Hemileuca rubridorsa means "half white, red back," or the Red-Backed Hemileuca. It's another relatively little known Mexican species of Hemileuca. Little known, I suspect, because Mexican; that country has so far produced more interesting wildlife than wildlife biologists. The economic significance of "butterfly tourism" is likely to change this. Mexican authors whose work comes up on a web search are aware of H. rubridorsa, as a species found in a location some people want to "develop" or in a museum, but they have yet to take an interest in its life cycle. There is still room for some young person to become famous as an expert on this species.

Photo by Mamole.

Individual moths aren't always reddish all over. Some are whitish or blackish gray but they still have reddish veins in their wings like the Citheronias. 

Photo by Jose Belem Hernandez Diaz. He suggested that people mention that it was found in Mexico. Nearly all rubridorsa are found in central Mexico, though it has been found (alive) in Florida.

All the Hemileucas are hairy; this is another species that looks as if it didn't even have a head.

Photo by Cecilia Ma. From the side that red-and-white tuft over the actual head would look like the head. The head is separate from the plump, hairy thorax, but it's just a little flat button to which the eyes and antennae attach.

Photo by Javier1028. The moths lack logical intelligence. When they were caterpillars, curling up with their bristly backs facing out protected them from many dangers. When they become moths, they no longer have bristles, and curling up makes it easy for predators to bite into them. It's possible that they may look to some predators like hornets about to sting, but oh well, no silk moth lives long in any case. Not having mouths means that silk moths can't eat or drink. As if designed to show the foolishness of Teen Romance, they can only mate. Once, maybe twice. Then if nothing's eaten them they die of old age.

Photo by Wendolyneleju. The Hemileucas seem to lose the scales on their wings more readily than most moths do. 

Despite some fear, during the Hemileuca oliviae population explosion between 1910 and 1920, that H. rubridorsa was "allied with" H. oliviae, its host plant is mimosa. 

Photo by Heri13. The severity of the sting depends on how many bristle tips touch your skin and whether any of them break off and stick in. The flat rosette shape of bristles on the back allows more bristle tips to touch a person, thus more venom. 

Photo by Adrianacervantesf. This caterpillar was parasitized, possibly in the egg stage, by some sort of small flying insect. Several species of small wasps and flies specialize in parasitizing large caterpillars. The parasite eggs hatch inside the caterpillar, who may be smaller and wormier than its siblings. Before the caterpillar pupates, the parasites do; they gnaw their way out through the caterpillar's skin and spin their little cocoons on its back/ They seem quite comfortable in between stngingworms' bristles. The caterpillar may live long enough to pupate, but it won't reproduce. 

While people who have had a close look at a stingingworm usually agree that the species ought to be extinct, human efforts to extirpate animal species have tended to backfire. It is more effective to work with nature and encourage natural predators to thin populations of species we don't like. Instead of trying to develop a poison spray to kill the stingingworms, we do better to focus on not using sprays that might harm those little wasps and flies that keep their numbers low.

Web Log for 11.19.24

Election 2024 

The shock waves continue. Naomi Wolf:

https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/dear-team-trump-dont-spike-the-football 

Glyphosate Awareness 

The "cola" in the URL indicates the article was written by Joseph Mercola. He's writing a bit beyond his pay scale and subject to correction by Real MD Doctors--if any of them have the fortitude to go there.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/glyphosate-toxic-destroys-health-cola/

See if Windows tries to block this Friends of the Earth report on "New Roundup," this version hailed as glyphosate-free, which does not mean it won't make people ill. In fact it's expected to make more people sicker sooner than glyphosate did. If the link doesn't work, it's FOE's fault. Backspace through the URL to go to foe.org/resources/, scroll down to the article "New Roundup New Risks," and download it. The site has a really annoying chatbot that will try to ask you for money first. I politely told it "It's a good idea not to let anything pop up and interfere with reading," which got it out of the way long enough for the download to go through. You may need to tell it something else...

https://foe.org/resources/new-roundup-new-risks/

Music

Content warning: Aunts are not supposed to recommend songs like this one. It was apparently released in the campaign season, but wouldn't have been played on local radio. There's a lot of reference to the Democratic Party animal totem, which isn't really so bad. The Ds claimed 81 million votes, so, y'know, 81 million votes for their emblem. Unfortunately there's also an expression used to mean "annoyed" that I really think Kari Lake should not have stooped to using in public. Someone also shows confusion between the Mean Girl's given name and guacamole. Tsk. I laughed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4XWiKZNMOU

How I Spend My Weekends

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks how book reviewers spend our weekends.

Well, typically I spend substantial parts of weekends reading books. I am a Christian without a church; reading a Christian book on the Saturday and writing about it on the Sunday is one form of Christian fellowship I have. 

The other form is visiting and being visited by people in the real world. (I do know some people in the real world; I just have a rule of writing about public figures, hypothetical people with generic names, and animals.) Some local lurkers have communicated to me that this web site would interest them more if it contained more details about who sold what to whom, and why, and who married whom, and why, and whether they knew something about their bride's or bridegroom's past, and so on. I don't like to talk or write about that kind of thing. Someone always gets a detail wrong and the writer can then be sued. 

I can occasionally mention a bit of local news that all the local people already know. For example, the marching band from East Tennessee State University, where many Gate City students go because it's only about thirty miles' drive, won a competition and will be marching in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I would never mention their names but there is a possibility that people watching the parade on television will see a young relative, or relatives, of mine. I don't plan to watch television on Thanksgiving Day but no doubt I'll see the video recording later.

But as a rule the only part of any conversation with real-world friends that was ever supposed to appear on this web site were Grandma Bonnie Peters' recipes and any reminiscences the non-writers at this web site ever wrote down. 

Anyway, my weekends usually include books, conversation, and nature walks. And food, although the hazards of trying new recipes still keep me from posting much of what GBP hoped would be this web site's main attraction--delicious food that is naturally gluten-free and, preferably, vegan. 

And the cats. I don't actually spend a lot of time with the cats. They don't normally hang out in the office or go for walks or drives. They get breakfast and dinner and, on sunny days, the water-sharing ritual. If the weather is pleasant I'll probably sit down on the porch, usually about sunset, and pet each cat for a bit, and dangle a hedge trimming for them to chase, almost every day. The cats are my friends, very dear friends, but not my children.

Prayer is a part of my days. Sleeping is. Bathing and toothbrushing are. Some form and amount of music is, and at least a few rows of knitting. By Sunday night, I'm usually on the screen porch, with a heater and bundles of knitted fabric as they become necessary, writing and scheduling the pre-scheduled posts for this web site. 

This all sounds very routine. Well, it is. The reward of a life well lived is that eventually you get to have a routine. There is also room for adventures in my weekends but, since, they involve other people, I don't write about them.

How do you spend your weekends? If you're a reviewer I have read or will soon read your blog. If not, please feel free to answer in the comments section.

Book Review: Dark Roots

Title: Dark Roots

Author: Lucius Valiant

Date: 2023

Publisher: Thornhill

Quote: "The rumor was that he already had a little vampire in his blood to begin with, and that a hunting accident had caused it to soar past the strict 30% threshold."

So Ramsay is no longer allowed to hunt, and he resents having heard Harlan, the narrator, described as the Van Helsing Society's "most promising hunter." His goal is to ensure that Harlan will be forbidden to hunt, just as he is.  

Will Harlan gain status by hunting down the Highgate vampires...after discovering that they're what's left of his blood relatives? Or will this be the rare novel in which the narrator's antagonist is the one who achieves his goal? I'm not telling.

Vampire stories aren't my favorite genre but, if they're yours, you will probably like this one. It's told by Victorian rules; if the vampires get up to any incestuous orgies, we're not told about it. All we see them do is bite. Though one biting scene goes into lurid details Bram Stoker tastefully withheld.

Why America Needs More Baby-Free Adults

It's an inescapable, self-evident truth: Our world needs fewer and better babies.

By "better" I mean, primarily, healthier thanks to the benefits of having adequate space to grow in, and more intelligent thanks to the benefits of growing up among adults not children. 

There are different ways of being intelligent. One way is to recognize the symptoms of overcrowding--loss of a sense of the value of human life, sterility, "alternative sexual identities," loss of resistance to diseases, "depression," violent hostility--in our daily news. We need to stop population growth at a point that allows most if not all people to live well, with land of their own and meaningful employment. We have passed that point. So: time to slow down on baby production. We have reached the time when it was prophesied that the barren would have more blessings than the fruitful. Human scientific progress has reached a point where we can choose, instead of having a plague or a war, just to have fewer babies. 

"Billions" means that there are a thousand times more humans than there need to be; that in order to get back to optimal population levels in one generation, only one person in a thousand should have one baby. We're not likely to achieve that but, certainly, every baby-free adult is helping humankind.

Our Vice-President-elect made an idle remark about "childless cat ladies" as people he did not expect to vote for him. It wasn't very funny but I proposed that some of us who had held our noses and voted for the lesser evil should have "Childless Cat Lady" printed on T-shirts and wear them to R victory parties. 

Then that opened the door for really sick ideas about baby-free adults to start spewing out of some Rs. Is it "bad for society" when people aren't married or don't have children? It's bad for society when people have babies because they don't realize that they could have good lives without babies. It's bad for society when a child is not a choice. It's bad for society when people don't understand that our animal urge to reproduce can and should be sublimated into our human sense of vocations to produce all sorts of things other than babies.

Let's face it. America is greying. Into the lives of greying people there comes a time when we know that babies, travel, etc., are ceasing to be valid excuses for not rescuing animals from shelter, and we may acquire more animal companions than we can pet at one time. This is known as The Many Paws. It's a wonderful time of life. There are a lot of us, male and female, never married, formerly married, and still married, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, enjoying Many Paws in baby-free homes. 

I think it's a mistake for people to think of animals as children. Animals are, or become, adults of their kind. They have their own parents and their own babies, in addition to any humans they have trained to fetch food for them. Animals are our friends. Our work is our "babies." Or rather, since we're all called to work but only some of us are called to have babies, parenting is one of many uses to which we can put our human brains. 

We might do better to think of having babies as one of the lower forms of work. We already do know that it can be an excuse, and even an actual cause, for lack of success in work--"Daddy was a farmer but all he ever raised was us." We could do more, as a society, to encourage people to think beyond the nursery. We already know that, when "Mary is a teacher, John is a lawyer, and Jane is the mother of...", Jane is going to be the insecure one, inclined to obesity and depression, in need of help to find an identity she does not share with a stray dog.

I saw a video where a larval Republican, obviously thinking of a specific person as her stereotype of "childless cat ladies," asked, "Are those the kind of people you want running society?" Well. I think of a fat White woman I saw, carrying a baby and leading a toddler, on the Metro where it's illegal to eat or drink or carry food and drink in open containers. The toddler wasn't even whining but the horrorcow shoved a stick of sticky sweet sculch into its mouth. "Excuse me," I said, "it's illegal to have food on the Metro." Horrorcow, clearly feeling that trains full of roaches were better than the thought of teaching her child to wait for anything, brayed "He can eat if he wants to!" Are THOSE the kind of people you want running society? Or running around loose? Of course giving birth does not automatically make people selfish, greedy scofflaws, but you must admit there are correlations among personality traits...

No. The democratic process allows multi-infant horrorcows to vote and trusts that there will be enough decent human beings to offset the damage they do. Sometimes after age forty a multi-infant horrorcow even whips herself into shape, gets a job, and becomes a useful member of society--though it may not be possible for that ever to be said for the surplus humans she's inflicted on the world. 

Surplus humans. Yes, Mommy-nom-nom. Human life is cheap. Countries as close to civilization as Japan and Canada have talked openly about thinning the herd, and from some US hospitals that reported high COVID fatalities have come reports that sound like an unofficial version of the same. If we don't want to become a society that talks frankly about the benefits of killing people with chronic illness or disability, we want to become a society where breeders bow their heads and murmur "Thank you for your continence" when the baby-free pass by. 

We want to become a society where teenagers are exposed to, and tested on, information about the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth in enough detail that a majority of boys opt for vasectomies--why waste all that rubber? We want to be a society that rewards celibacy even more than marriage. We want to be a society where baby-free couples are seen as heroes of public spirit. We want to be a society that "sells" baby-freedom in every way, short of punishing the innocent babies. Where mommies and daddies can earn enough money to feed their broods, e.g., but promotion to management jobs is reserved for the baby-free.

We want those things because, although they run counter to generations of instincts that told us that our lives would be short and we needed as many babies as possible, they are also what will protect us from paying the favored type to have more babies while slaughtering the less favored type of humans. In order to be Nazi leaders Hitler and his colleagues had to be drugged-out and probably literally demonized, but it did start with "We love babies, we idealize the genotype that withstands even inbreeding among beautiful, hardy, healthy Icelanders, but we can't afford a socialist system for very many people..."They really couldn't. So they started killing. 

Well, we don't want killing, and the alternative costs just a dime. It works like this: The woman holds the dime between her knees whenever the couple are together. 

So then...the normal human instinct for self-actualization is always impeded when people "run down to babies." People are more likely to feel that they've succeeded at being themselves, doing what they were meant to do, when they're not entangled in diapers. 

The normal family does not and never did consist of two adults and two children moved all over the country by corporate whims. Real families have roots, and there are more adults than the breeding pair in each one. The Bible writers spoke of Abraham's travels almost as glibly as if the man had been riding around like a lonesome cowboy with only a horse to talk to, but actually he travelled with a cantankerous wife, an elderly father, a nephew he and his wife had taken in to raise, animals by the thousands, and enough hired men to match a city-state's army--and win. Real families have grandparents, they have nephews, they have aunts and uncles and cousins. Baby-free people should not be imagined as anti-family, but as those aunts and uncles the family needs. Babies should not be left with strangers or in "day care centers," but sent to visit aunts or grandmothers, when the parents need baby-free space. 

Despite the evil machinations of corporate employers, who feel powerful when they separate people from their family base, reality is that baby-free adults do not lead "childless" lives. We spend more time with children who are old enough to be good company than with yowling, drooling infants--a big improvement. We get some choice about how much time we spend with the next generation. Most of us enjoy our nieces and nephews, and of course those who became baby-free by rearing children to adulthood notoriously dote on their grandchildren. Many baby-free adults are interested in homeschooling because, after about grade three, we're called in as upper-level teachers./Our baby-making siblings went to the same high schools we did but they've forgotten a lot since they had these babies.

I think it would be good for children if we moved in the direction of being a society where people had ancestral homes, where people were free to travel but always knew where "home" was. A "citizen of the world" is a homeless, rootless wretch. We learn to be citizens by being citizens of a particular house in a particular neighborhood. Children need the controlled adventures of walking from Mommy's and Daddy's house to Uncle John's house next door, then Grandmother's house up the road, then Aunt Jane's house on the other side of town. Many families have lost that privilege by failing to acknowledge the roles of baby-free relatives in completing a family. "Nuclear families" are like isolated atoms, apt to be smashed or lose their elemental integrity; they need to reunite into extended families to be really part of their element.

I personally don't know any baby-free people who really feel that "the cats are my children." Joke about it, maybe. Cats are remarkably unrewarding substitutes for children. They can be great friends to those who appreciate them for what they are, but for a baby-substitute a rock would have to work better. How does any reasonable aunt deal with cravings for child company? She invites the nieces and nephews to visit, of course. A good aunt spoils children, now and then, swooping in with saved-up money to ask "Who wants to go to the mall, or the beach, or Dollywood?" A good aunt also makes children feel spoiled when they're being invited to help paint a room or pick fruit. Grandma Bonnie Peters taught a grandchild of the appropriate age to work for the privilege of vacuum-cleaning her carpets. Baby-free adults normally interact with children only for fun, and can enjoy feeling "more popular" than beloved parents are as children drop everything at the happy cry, "Grandma's here!" Cats...well...they can love and be loved. Some cats do try to cheer up humans who aren't feeling good; some will fight in defense of their humans, and some will try to lead their humans away from what they think may be danger. Cats do not really have many interests in common with humans. Nor do dogs, although dogs make even more persistent efforts to redirect humans' attention to the interests we do have in common with dogs. 

But why, given that aunts and uncles and grandparents have all these natural, wholesome outlets for any baby-specific component in our instinct to do productive work, are there baby-free adults who direct what seem like frustrated parental instincts into nannyism? They live to help others, no matter how hard the others try to escape. Legislation that purports to keep people "safe" is usually subsidized by corporations (insurance companies that don't want to pay if someone falls off a bicycle, manufacturers that want to protect the world from the risk of not buying all of their products) and should not be blamed on aunts. There are, however, some detestable renegade aunts who are not welcomed by their nieces and nephews, so they feel sad and rejected, and take it out of everyone else by supporting those stupid corporate laws. It's not saaafe to let the children walk to and from school! Better to expose them to all those germs on the bus and then let them play football for exercise! And it's not saaafe to burn the leaves in the yard! Better to spray poison on the yard! And oh dear you'd better put down that stick before you hit OOOFFF...

Why do these people always seem to line up on the Left? "Seem to" is a keyword. They have in fact been found on the Right, but the Left gives them more visibility when they can be persuaded to whine about how they need a big, all-powerful government to keep them safe from their fool selves. A delegate to a Democratic Party convention, early in the present century, stood up in front of a TV camera and loudly proclaimed, "I have a broken brain!" Indeed. Childlessness may be an accompanying symptom, or an effect, of nannyism but the primary cause is the broken brain.

And then there are the poor souls who vote for all the nannyism and nincompoopery. Their plight really is sad. They are nice, normal, baby-free adults. You might be their housemate or co-worker and notice nothing wrong with them. What happened to them? Maybe they went to a "good" college on a scholarship and alienated some people who didn't have to earn scholarship-worthy grades. Maybe they had enough sense not to want to marry a college boy, however promising, and while they were keeping in touch with the college boys as friends, more desperate females threw themselves at the college boys, who are still trying to figure out exactly what they were thinking when they proposed marriage to the desperate females. (Or it might be the other way round; the pressure on men to get married, just to fit in, works differently but it works on men too.) So they were fresh out of college with their job skills and their jobs and their sweet youthful faces and their crazy adolescent energy. And then...

Maybe they thought the church could use their energy, and then they were allowed to read or overhear some "inside" church discussion of what to do about the horrible plague of single adults in the church. 

Maybe they thought that, although they were paying off their student debt faster in industry jobs, they liked teaching, so they volunteered as substitutes or teachers' aides or maybe PTA officials, and they heard all the women who'd failed to get good jobs spitting about their not having babies yet. 

Too many "conservative" groups have fallen into a habit of thinking of human beings as animals in a Noah's Ark toy to line up two by two. Oh, XYZ has a great singles group! These women hoped for the sort of casual fun they had in college activity groups, hiking, singing, volleyball for all I know. So they went to the singles group and someone grabbed them by their arms and plopped them down at tables facing the most unattractive men in the Eastern States, and ordered them to chat. 

So they said, "I have a home. I need to go back to it now. Right now. I might have left something turned on," and they went home. 

And then on the Left, even though some of it was pretty off-putting, they found such a warm, welcomng atmosphere. People noticed their job skills and offered them government jobs. They found housemates. They found other dog walkers walking at the same times they walked their dogs. Most of their new friends didn't have children, or even spouses, so there was no pressure about their being single. They never have believed any of the D party froth about how horrible Republicans are...but they have to admit they've known Rs who were pretty unpleasant to know, while these Ds are practically congenial...

Many of the different groups that are classified as conservative, in the United States, are bigoted against single, baby-free adults, and end up pushing them into the anti-marriage Left, even though the reason why the Loony Left was anti-marriage always has been that Loony Left men think all attractive women should be involved in theoretically state-paid, free-to-the-user prostitution. So we meet Ds who are still single at age forty or fifty because most people they know just don't like the idea of marriage anyway, and they've never found anyone that they liked the idea of marriage to, either. They're not anti-marriage themselves. When they're not in the city doing their jobs they like hanging out with their nephews. But they don't want to join the anti-bachelor social circles they left, or support whatever political ideas those people support, which just about have to be bad because those people are so icky. Whole neighborhoods in Washington are full of these bachelors. They actually belong to nice families, and like their families, but they have been alienated by hateful bigots who call themselves "pro-family." So they reach age sixty or seventy still trying to identify primarily with their buddies, like high school kids. (Many of them are still renting apartments and don't even have pets.)

They were my buddies once. I still have a few car-pool lists of dozens, hundreds, of them who were in various activity groups in Washington. Network members, prospective housemates, foster parents of my adoptive sister's school friends, dance partners, band members, hiking buddies, car pools, activists working on the same issues, dates. Marriage was almost like quitting school, a defection, a rejection of friends. A lot of us were still in that school when I left the city. Our lives were good, at the time. We were the bright young things sipping overpriced coffee at Starbucks. Now, as some of us begin to consider being old as a thing that can happen to us...in the famous words, to all old buddies going home to "take your place there the spent and maimed among," I hope all of you can "find one face there you loved when all was young."

Conservatives might get away with a few witticisms about the "childless" people who vote D, because most baby-free people that I know are comfortable with ourselves and can take a joke. Still, they'd do well to work on a positive outreach to welcome more unmarried aunts and uncles, more widows in no hurry to remarry, and more grandparents back into "the family." Honor and celebrate our single-mindedness. Save any job that involves making decisions, or could potentially involve overtime work, or would ever involve travel even to a different town, for someone who is baby-free. Thank us for our self-control and public spirit. Make sure that those of us who are not, in fact, Marxists are appreciated for our kind of political, or civic, or religious activity. 

Churches could, for a start, organize more things for men's groups and women's groups, or for real family groups as distinct from couples, with spaces for aunts, uncles, and grandparents as part of the family. They could talk openly about how at one time God commanded humans to "be fruitful and multiply," but now it's plainly written in the Book of Nature that God has crossed this one off our list of things to do and now wants us to focus on practicing good will toward one another. 

All of us could do with a bit of detachment from what may actually be selfish genes prompting us to babble, "But I don't want my heirs to look Chinese, I want a red-haired blue-eyed grandson with double-jointed thumbs like my grandfather..." Have a little faith at least in genetic science. For better or worse, whether or not we have grandchildren and whether or not our grandchildren resemble us more than they do their other grandparents, our genes will pop up again.