[phoenixvoice]

Dr D
Thus we discard our fathers, all their books and statues and “Listen to the children” like Greta (Now long an adult).

I do not believe that Marx was “evil.” I do believe that he was flawed — that he was human. And, I do believe that his writings have been used to further tyrannical, evil causes. However, the ideas of many have been used to further tyrannical causes — including the contents of the Old and New Testaments. (Otherwise, the book Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend would never have been specifically directed towards Christians.).

In fact, it is in the New Testament that we are told “…and a little child shall lead them.” In the Old Testament: “Walk as children of light.” Joan of Arc was little more than a child, led armies, was killed for her convictions…and later made a Catholic saint.

Greta was a child. She feels deeply, and was raised to give honest voice to her convictions. Had she been raised in a different family, she might have been fighting against abortion every Friday. She has been used by the establishment to further their own goals. I pity her. I would not have permitted my child to be used thusly, but then, if Greta’s beliefs mirror those of her parents (which is likely,) then I can see how easily her parents could have been hoodwinked.

One of my sons is likely slightly autistic (never formally assessed.). His thinking is very black and white, and he looks to me and other trusted adults for confirmation and guidance. He is 17, so I find myself frequently endeavoring to chip away at the harsh divide in his mind between polar opposites, as I try to help him see the grays and “in betweens.”

Greta appears to be bright enough. Someday, when life throws her enough curveballs that don’t fit into her worldview, she will either learn to see the grays, or she will go somewhat mad. If she learns to see more broadly, it will be interesting to see how she acts at that point, whether fighting against those who formally upheld her, or compromising her core self, or something else.

[phoenixvoice]

I have found a good use for the stupid masks…the well-fitting cotton masks are very good for spending an hour in the attic. They lower the number of dust particles that I breathe in, which makes a noticeable improvement. Amazing…a dust mask is somewhat effective at preventing one from breathing dust — but all that other, tinier stuff, just forget it.

[phoenixvoice]

Dark horse podcast interviewed an independent reporter who was on the ground in Lahaina.

[phoenixvoice]

Is an atheist food bank simply a secular food bank? The food bank closest to me IS secular. It is run by a hospital. And, no, the hospital was never run by a church. I live in the Sunnyslope neighborhood of Phoenix. This community was founded by people with tuberculosis and other ailments whose doctors had recommended an arid climate. These people and their families moved to Phoenix and settled north of the canal — where there was no irrigation, no farms, less pollen, and (one would suppose) cheaper land. There were a lot of sick and impoverished people. A nurse decided to help these people. Through her efforts the “Desert Mission” was established. The Desert Mission became the John C. Lincoln hospital and the Desert Mission Food Bank. The school my children attended for kindergarten is far enough that they were bussed. The bus stop was two streets over, so I used to walk them there in the mornings. The strop was in front of an empty parcel of land — about an acre. The land was owned by the Food Bank, and was promised to be used for low income housing. A few years back, the hospital was sold. The new owner still runs the food bank, but didn’t want the parcel of land, and so sold it to a local non-profit with a covenant to develop it as low-income housing. This was actually done! Now, instead of being a place where people illegally dump or where homeless camp, it is full of neat rows of town-houses. It looks very nice, and has a playground. People are beginning to move in. People have to be low-income to live there, the prices are kept low, and they buy the residences, so that they can build equity even if they don’t have perfect credit or don’t have a large enough down payment.

Humans are humans. Many religious people are great! Many agnostics and atheists are also great! There are also nasty people who are religious, agnostic, or atheist. Just being a theist doesn’t make someone a quality person. However, it is true that because religions generally try to get parishioners to follow moral codes, and most of the moral codes associated with religions are pretty decent, that if you run across a religious person who is genuinely trying to follow their religion, they are usually a quality person. With the non-religious it may take more effort to ascertain whether someone is a quality person.

[phoenixvoice]

US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in the statement on Thursday. He added that innovations in agricultural biotechnology to enhance yields also help ease the challenges of global food and nutrition security, climate change and food price inflation. “And these innovations increase the capacity for mega-corporations and overweening governments to exert increasingly coercive control over large populations.” There. Fixed it. That was the part that was “between the lines.”

[phoenixvoice]

Karl Sagan on greenhouse effect yesterday

That is my view precisely…no need to start running around screaming “the sky is falling,” but we have been pumping the atmosphere with CO2, blithely ignoring the fact that we don’t know what the effect may be. The argument that the planet has sustained life not too different from what we have now with higher levels of CO2 is a valid one, and means that we needn’t do anything rash, but to pretend that the large amounts of CO2 put into the atmosphere by humans is “A-okay” and will have no effect is wishful thinking. There has to be a middle ground — where we aren’t swayed by anyone’s propaganda and those studying climate and related sciences can do their work without strongly biased pressure one way or the other. Fossil fuels are not infinite; humans should be experimenting with alternatives so that we reduce the speed at which we consume fossil fuels and find a way to preserve the best parts from our modern way of life for our posterity. Some of the alternatives will turn out to be dead-ends. (Alternatives that require copious amounts of rare earth metals, their extraction poisoning drinking water and requiring slave labor to be economically viable are probably going to ultimately be dead-ends.)

[phoenixvoice]

Beams and motes and beams in eyes

Chris Hedges is spot on about Israel. He lived in and reported on the Arab world for a long time. However, he appears to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the Covid & vaccine narrative, even though he is typically skeptical of political authority. He is familiar with the world of the elites because he was a gifted student, and was given scholarships to attend prestigious schools and mingle with the scions of the wealthy and powerful.

RFK Jr is spot on about corruption in government and industry generally. He has decades of intimate knowledge and experience about corporate polluters, Big Pharma, and the cozy relationship they have with government regulators. He is extensively familiar with the problems with vaccinations. Because of his family background, he has political connections, and an understanding of government and elite levers of power that most folks do not have. Because of his family background, he believes the “moral story” around Israel — this particular area of corruption is not closely related to his life’s work.

There are no flawless heroes — just flawed humans. However, there is a big difference between Chris Hedges, RFK Jr, and — although I never thought that I would say this — Donald Trump, who, although flawed, are trying to chart a course in line with valid moral principles, and with Bidens’R’Us, the deep state blob, and WEFfers cabal who are basing their charted course on characteristics lifted from the “Cluster B Personality Disorders” section of the DSM.

~~~~

In other realms of existence…
Over the past 4 days my 15 year old daughter has told me in detail, and given me a couple of her diary entries, about her father’s expressions of suicidal ideation, incipient sexual abuse, obvious verbal abuse of her brother, and revealed that she has been flirting with suicide for years as a means to escape her father’s household. In an hour I will be consulting with my attorney and I expect to be filing legal papers to reopen the custody case a few hours after that.

I always suspected/expected that this was going on, but I didn’t have any proof, only a mother’s hunch…and I knew that my intuition wouldn’t hold water in court. Now it is time to act.

Wish me luck.

[phoenixvoice]

Interesting stuff:

Pfizer on successful trajectory to reduce world population in half, a part of its 2019 5 year plan. Can’t quite believe it, but then words line up with the mouth.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla: “It’s really something of a dream that we had together w/ my medicine team — we set up the goals for the next 5yrs & one of them was by 2023 we will reduce the number of people in the world by 50%”

Klaus Schwab: “So it’s really a purpose driven company” pic.twitter.com/Aept7qzvMr

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) August 13, 2023

New song trending: rich men north of Richmond

I can’t listen to Oliver Anthony's “Rich Men North of Richmond” without getting chills.

It's raw, it's true, & it's touching the hearts of men & women across this great nation.

Thank you, @AintGottaDollar for writing the anthem of this moment in American history. pic.twitter.com/D7VTtMVv97

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) August 12, 2023

Bear rejects Big Mac
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1690818617472933889?s=20

[phoenixvoice]

I’m scratching my head trying to figure out the significance of Kunstler’s leading quote to a fictional character from the early 2000s remake of Battlestar Galactica. I’m fairly certain the fictional character never expressed that quote…as there was no “West” in the show to reference, that I can recall. Is there someone on Substack who has adopted the “Gaius Baltar” moniker? He is a problematic, flawed character at best. A kind of antihero.

[phoenixvoice]

JB-hb
Regarding music
It isn’t just that there are fewer jobs and opportunities for performing musicians.
Music has become something consumed rather than something created.
I played a few times as a substitute for the usual duo for happy hour at a room adjacent to the tiny bar at the local retirement community. They especially like songs that they can sing along with. Most of the songs are copyrighted, popular songs from the 1950s and forward. I realized as they hummed or sang along that these songs are what people know — they essentially are the “folk music” of the 20th century — but they are owned by corporations instead of being the birthright of the people. And all most folks can do with them is sing along, because the creation of music has been outsourced to a small-ish number of people.

[phoenixvoice]

Oxymoron – single
Kudos! I would love a listen when it is ready. 🙂 I finished a song last week myself…I’m not yet ready to share it here…I’m still growing accustomed to the chord progressions and don’t play them flawlessly yet, lol. It’s about how fear is used to control us….

[phoenixvoice]

Piers Corbyn defies store policy, purchasing strawberries with coin, rather than electronic means.

https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1686061060753702926?s=20

[phoenixvoice]

Comment retry…..

———————-

@VP
Yesterday, regarding undocumented immigrants, everything I related was not from an article where a writer spoke with others, it was from my first-hand experience with people that I have known personally over the course of many, many years. Secondhand accounts, no matter the source, no matter how vitriolic, cannot blot out my lived experience.

Yes, there are criminals who happen to be immigrants. And there are criminals who are citizens. Those who commit violent crimes and who are vandalizing and thieving ought to be turned over to the legal apparatus.

I am sure that there are undocumented criminals in Phoenix. But I have never gotten to know one. I have had people here in my life that I have known pretty well that along the way I figured out probably didn’t have their immigration status in proper order. Every one was a solid person, contributing well to their family and the overall economy. Now, it may be that I don’t bother taking the time to get to know people who are criminals. However, for the folks that I have known that I am fairly sure are undocumented, to force them to leave would be to rip them away from the bosoms of citizens who are family and friends whom they benefit and support.

In the Bible, doesn’t it talk of sifting the chaff from the wheat? I see the logic in ejecting the undocumented who are chaff, but there is no sense in ejecting the undocumented who are the wheat.

[phoenixvoice]

And….here we go again…

~~~~~~~~

I do not think that my daughter’s automatic distrust of authority figures is a great boon to her. Any automatic trust/distrust is problematic — it causes people to make rash decisions that can have far-reaching effects. It is more important to bring online the rational, thinking mind to analyze the situation — incorporating gut-feelings and intuition into the process.

My daughter’s automatic distrust of authority figures has contributed to her history of eating disorder, self-harm, and depression. In 8th grade she did not get along with a teacher and resorted to self-harm to deal with the emotions — I had to contact the school to get her changed to a different class once I realized what was going on. In 9th grade she again had an authoritarian teacher, and struggled, but followed the “proper” steps at my urging, going to her counselor and following the proscribed instructions. When she was too nervous to take the final step of speaking with the vice principal, I stepped in and contacted the vice principal and the change happened. Now, her 10th grade schedule is incorrect, and — all on her own, with no input from me (she was at her dad’s) — she penned a cogent email to her counselor explaining the errors, the reasons why they are errors, and explaining why she needs a different elective in order to avoid panic attacks. I have modeled to her that automatic distrust is often self-sabotaging, and it is frequently more useful to grant partial trust, test whether or not the trust is warranted, granting a sliver or two more trust when authority figures “pass the test.” Don’t trust authority figures beyond what is useful, or beyond what has been tested, keep testing them, be wary about how much trust you grant, and be ready to rescind your trust as needed. Full trust is something rare, and should only be granted to individuals who have proven themselves worthy of such trust over a long period of time.

[phoenixvoice]

Try 2….

~~~~~~~~~~

@ Alexander Carpenter
@ Formerly T-Bear

I’ve run across these issues periodically on TAE. I usually access TAE from Firefox on an iPad. Some tips:
– if your comment didn’t take, but you are still logged into the site, immediately use the browser back button. Often, your comment is still in the browser cache, and you can copy it out of the comment box and try again with a fresh reload of the site.
– if your comment didn’t take, and now you find yourself logged out, open a new tab, log in, go back to the original tab and use the back button — occasionally you can return to what you wrote that way.
– Realize that TAE has some comment SPAM filters in place. When you comment and the site claims the comment took, but it doesn’t display, that means that your comment was likely stored successfully in the website database, but isn’t displaying due to a glitch. You can paste the comment in and try again, but you will need to preface it with some text, characters, carriage returns, etc., to make the first part different that the disappeared comment. The comment SPAM filter appears to only look at the first part of a comment when determining whether or not it is SPAM.
– to avoid using the back button to revive a comment, you can (a) write the comment in a different program on your device and copy it into the comment box, or (b) simply copy (i.e, to the device clipboard) the comment before posting so that you can paste it back out if you have fallen prey to the comment gremlin.

(Ah…the world of workarounds with technical devices….)

[phoenixvoice]

Take 3 on this comment…..

~~~~~~~~

Um, ok, MacGregor suggesting telling “all illegals” to just leave and register for re-try in the way out illustrates to me that he doesn’t have a clear grasp of the problem. I agree that the border needs to be “closed” in some sense — but not completely, there are people who live on one side and go to work and school on the other. And many “illegals” have been here for 10, 20, 40 years. Does anyone really expect a 70+ year old Mexican granny who has been here 30+ years and who spends her day tending her American citizen great-grandchildren to leave under an order like that? Or the man who has been here 10 years, married to a woman who is either a citizen or legal resident, and has fed and clothed her two daughters since they were small, even though they are not his own? Or the man who fled with his wife and son nearly 20 years ago because he accidentally pissed off a Mexican cartel boss and now has teen children who are American citizens? Or the son in the former paragraph, a “dreamer” with no recollection of Mexico, brought as a young child, who had a public education in the US and is attending university, close to graduating. THIS is why not enforcing immigration laws is such a mess! Because immigrants tend to weave themselves into the fabric of our communities, and becoming our neighbors and friends and business associates. At this point, ordering them all to leave, if the directive were followed, would wrench families and communities apart. Any such directive is doomed to failure because families and communities will resist being torn apart.

[phoenixvoice]

I still have this issue of parents not having access to teen’s medical portals rolling around in my head.

• This is not being driven by state law. This is state law:
Appendix B: Arizona Revised Statute 26-2272
36-2272. Consent of parent required for mental health screening or treatment of minors; exception; violation; classification;
definition
A. Except as otherwise provided by law or a court order, no person, corporation, association, organization or state-supported
institution, or any individual employed by any of these entities, may procure, solicit to perform, arrange for the performance
of or perform mental health screening in a nonclinical setting or mental health treatment on a minor without first obtaining the
written or oral consent of a parent or a legal custodian of the minor child. If the parental consent is given through telemedicine,
the health professional must verify the parent’s identity at the site where the consent is given.
B. This section does not apply when an emergency exists that requires a person to perform mental health screening or
provide mental health treatment to prevent serious injury to or save the life of a minor child.
C. A person who violates this section is guilty of a class 1 misdemeanor.
D. For the purposes of this section, “parent” means the parent or legal guardian of a minor child.
• The pamphlet is put out by the Arizona Medical Association. After the covid issues, we know that these medical associations all appear to be in the pocket of some sort of superior force of will, some sort of totalitarian-flavored dystopic mythos.
• The pamphlet was put out in 2018 – before the gender hysteria reached its current heights, suggesting that this has been in the works for quite some time.

Here’s the thing:
Teens, although often very competent in some areas of life (with a great deal of individual variation), are not typically sufficiently competent in our complex societies to avoid being hoodwinked and manipulated by those who wish to do so. (For that matter, they are not magically able to do this well at age 18, however, that is the legal age of adulthood.) Parents are by virtue of the law and by tradition obligated to look out for the welfare and well-being of their children, including teens up to age 18. While there are some parents who don’t do this well, and others who neglect this duty or violate it, abusing their children, there is no natural surrogate for this responsibility. Also, in the case of children whose parents are neglectful or abusive, they have already had one (or two) of the natural authoritative figures in their lives violate their duty, which means that such children often fixate on authority figures either too easily or with great reluctance. Children that fixate on authority figures too easily are easily manipulated; children who respect authorities with great reluctance often avoid sources where otherwise they might have obtained aid. Teens whose parents are problematic may seek out other trustworthy adults – but doing so must be on the teen’s own terms, who is trustes cannot be mandated by law nor by the Arizona Medical Association.

In the case of my own daughter, her father destroyed her trust in authorities at a very young age, and once the court mandated that the kids spend more than six hours a week with their father, he denigrated me in front of the children with his expanded access, causing her to sabotage her relationship with me as well. I have regained her trust, but it took years before she and I rebuilt that trust relationship. The idea that my daughter – or any child who has responded to a mis-behaving parent as she has – would suddenly trust some sort of medical or behavioral health professional proffering “confidential” services is ridiculous. It’s even more ridiculous in light of Arizona law that says that a teen cannot receive “confidential” care without parental consent! And Arizona law says that parents can pull the records for such care.

Teens are open to manipulation, due to their lack of maturity. Parents are a bulwark to block and prevent others from manipulating their teens. Removing parents from the equation opens up all teens to manipulation by other adults and other entities and social forces.

Hm. My daughter will be getting two more annual exams before she is 18. My sons will be getting one each. The next time I go to one of these exams I’m going to bring a copy of the relevant Arizona statute and decline the confidential interview. (The provider was asking about my teen’s sexual orientation for goodness sakes!) It is my legal right to do so and there is no reason to subject my teens to this intrusive interview. (And, okay, I’m going to enjoy declining it—very politely.)

[phoenixvoice]

Oroboros yesterday:
“Received this from a source in Washington. This pediatric clinic revokes parents’ access to their kid’s medical records when the kid turns 13, and says kids can make their own medical decisions.”

Yes, this has been going on for quite some time — at least 5 years or more. I lost access to my son’s portal with the children’s hospital when he was 13. He has behavioral problems and despite his raw intelligence, which is solid, he is immature in many other areas. At age 13 I was of the opinion that it not beneficial for him to understand that he needed to grant his parent access to his online medical records. It would not have helped his overall demeanor. Therefore, we have not used the portal since then.

When the boys were 13, the medical items that teens could restrict parents from knowing about were minimal. However, it appears that this is expanding: https://az.childrenshealthdefense.org/healthcare/child-health/parental-access-to-medical-records-for-children-12-and-older/

Last month at the annual exam for my 15 year old daughter, the provider had me leave for a few minutes so that she could talk to my daughter alone. This bothered me….but I was in the hall and the insulation wasn’t acoustically sound—With little effort I could follow the conversation. And, because my daughter is who she is, later in the car my daughter complained about the confidential bit, reporting to me about the questions, and explained that she didn’t like the provider at all—the provider had failed to earn my daughter’s trust and therefore my daughter would tell her nothing. Unsurprising…the provider tried early in the visit to guilt my daughter for not being vigilant enough in her tooth care, and from that moment on the provider had burned all bridges with my daughter, lol. So they want to treat teens as adults when it comes to confidentiality, but at the same time treating them as little children when it comes to dental care — quixotic.

I’d switch providers for that and other issues…but that would involve agreement with my ex, and these annoyances do not negatively affect the children and aren’t worth the effort of wrangling with their father.

Also…these changes seem to be on unsteady legal ground. Although teens have to grant electronic portal access to parents, legally parents have access to medical records with the same very few exceptions…which is why my daughter cannot obtain psychotherapy, as her father would have to agree to it and would have access to the records. (Teens Psychotherapy records are not able to be shielded from parents in AZ.)

In Arizona, a minor is not considered the client; the parent(s) is/ are. -https://eastvalleytraumacounseling.com/treating-adolescents/treating-a-minor-in-arizona/

[phoenixvoice]

I have been aware for some time that the local retirement community has been struggling financially since Covid. I know part of the problem is that in addition to independent living they also have an assisted living unit, a memory care unit, and a care center for residents who temporarily require medical assistance while recovering from some malady. These last three units receive Medicare funding, and as such all employees of the community were mandated to take the jab. I noticed that at about the same time several long time employees left, and the retirement community has struggled to fill all of these positions. Of course, the inflation is contributing, and most residents are on fixed incomes. The community began outsourcing some services that previously were in-house. Last week an additional problem was acutely brought to my attention: they cannot seem to find enough new residents to fill the empty spaces or to fund pending construction. I suspect that deaths are also up, contributing to vacancies, but I have neither data nor anecdote to corroborate this. I wonder if the other retirement communities in the greater metro area are experiencing similar problems…?

[phoenixvoice]

Hunh. Same posting issue. Here goes another attempt, maybe this time it works?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another thought on climate change:

When big business was ignoring environmental issues and government was so cosy with business that it, too, was, for the most part, ignoring environmental issues, there was a certain logic to being involved with environmental activist activities to “wake up” the populace, the government, business to the need to address our wastes.

However, the Cabal/Deep State/WEFfers decided that in order to enact their totalitarian aims, they needed to have “moral warriors” in order to hypnotize the populace with fear and moral rectitude. (‘Cause totalitarianism only works when you can frame it in moral terms.). So, they chose a variety of issues, all of which were calculated to resonate strongly with Millennials and later generations. Hence, we have “Woke folk” taking a “moral” stand on climate change, LGBT(etc.), race, and words-that-make-you-feel-badly. The older generation folks who are in league with the deep state are the pied pipers in this routine, and so they add to the “moral” mixture other issues that support their agenda, such as “trust science,” masks and vaccines for grandma, and censorship of “hate.”

It seems that regular, run-of-the-mill environmentalism has been totally lost in the shuffle — human rights also.

[phoenixvoice]

Problem posting…but didn’t lose the comment. Trying again, with this at the head to avoid the “duplicate post” tag. If it really is a duplicate, my apologies….(just skip over.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I experienced the random browser redirects both yesterday and today. They remind me of similar behavior on a website that I use occasionally when I need to download a video from YouTube.

@ oroboros — store owner scaring thieves with bong yesterday
I can’t help but like these store people…they are keeping kittens under the counter, lol. However, the wearing of pants so tightly that they slip down the hips has really got to go.

Here’s the thing with climate change:
(1) Atmospheric CO2 is currently higher than it has ever been during the existence of humans on the planet.
(2) In the famous “hockey stick graph” with data from ice cores, tracking temperature and CO2 through earth’s ages, there appears to be a correlation between higher temperatures and higher CO2 levels. However, the temperature leads and CO2 follows.
(3) This means that, quite frankly, we humans don’t know what the long term affect on the planet will be from releasing all of the carbon trapped for millions of years in fossil formations into the atmosphere.

We humans don’t know whether our planet’s temperatures will be significantly affected by this free-flowing carbon or not.

It is appropriate that scientists collect data, construct models, create hypotheses, test theories and that they — and the rest of us — have glorious discussions and arguments about it.

One thing is increasingly clear:
The current big pushes to address the additional carbon floating around are grounded in the desires of well-positioned people to secure their own high position in society and to reduce the sovereignty of the masses, reducing the liberty of the masses.

Electric cars, as currently built, use less fossil fuel to run, but over their life cycle do not consume less fossil fuel inputs. The bulk of the burgeoning “eco” economy has similar problems, including toxic byproducts and child and slave labor to keep costs down.

Do humans need to cogently address the wastes of their lifestyle? Yes, of course. And it is not uncommon for advanced human societies to ignore their wastes, and to have this ignorance eventually contribute to civilization failure. However, the problem of our wastes is currently being wielded as a police baton to cow the populace into submission. This is not going to create a healthy civilization and will lead to civilization failure even faster than the issue of ignoring our wastes.

[phoenixvoice]

Jb-he
We in Western civilization believe DEEPLY in a particular kind of equality. We believe in standards. We believe that everyone can rise to meet THOSE standards – of being GOOD people. Deeply.

So when someone is NOT being good, is NOT playing fair, is being deceitful, nasty, destructive, we reach out and say – you are my equal. Typically, cognitive dissonance between how they are ACTUALLY behaving and the compliment. The instinctive human reaction is then to measure up to the standards they were complimented on.

Fascinating. THIS essentially, is what locked me into a disastrous marriage for over a decade. According to my Western worldview, heavily influenced by the Mormon upbringing, it took me a very long time to come to the conclusion that my then-husband was simply a “bad” and “irredeemable” person, or, at least, that he was choosing the “bad” behavior because that was what he wanted, and that there was no “good person” hiding in there, just needing the right circumstances to come out — that I had no ability to create nor encourage the “right circumstances.”

The family court system insists that we must continually accept that a parent who has acted badly in the past is now reformed when “good behavior” is displayed. The court only ever sees a brief snapshot, and is incapable of coming to lucid conclusions, and even a thorough “family evaluation” is not going to provide more than a small album of such snapshots.

[phoenixvoice]

DBS
I maintain that using mechanism to perform tasks that humans can do better (like think, understand and judge) is worse than a slippery slope. It’s a laundry chute, to total individual incompetence.

It is more than that. A machine can create music that is technically “perfect.” However, this can never supplant the effects on an individual from the discipline of learning to create music that approaches “perfection.” Nor can it replicate the results on human society that come from humans that have trained themselves in music.

Other disciplines work this way as well, be they carpentry, auto mechanics, drafting, writing, etc. Machines are good at relieving humans from repetitive motions that can wear down and wear out our biological hardware. Machines can substitute for situations where learning must occur in gestalt with other humans when competent others are not readily available. (Such as learning to jam to music by playing with recorded music.). They can relieve us from repetitive thought processes that we have already mastered, enabling us to move on to a next level. But when machines are used to free us from learning and experiencing physical and mental disciplines, we become lax, we never fully mature, we skip over important developmental stages and fall short of our human potential.

[phoenixvoice]

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix-weather/2020/08/11/officially-phoenix-hottest-summer-record-since-1895/3350290001/

Basically, we have not had the highest summer temps this year — nothing over 119F yet — but it seems that there is obligation to push the climate change narrative. So, instead they comb the data for data sets that show that this year is the hottest thing yet, and craft an article around it:

The average maximum temperature this summer has been 107.9 degrees. Runners-up are 107.6 degrees in both 1989 and 1978.
The average temperature this summer has been 96 degrees. Runners-up are 95.4 degrees in 2016 and 95.3 degrees in 2006.
The average minimum temperature this summer has been 84.2 degrees, tied with the same temperature in 2006 and followed by 83.7 degrees in 2016.

The article, towards the end, does have the honesty to bring up the urban heat island effect, which affects Phoenix temperatures in a major way. It doesn’t mention that we have been on an upswing from the little ice ages since the 1600s (nod to Dr D — I didn’t remember the century for this off the top of my head), nor that temperatures in Phoenix have only been recorded since 1895 (no idea when temps began to be recorded for the rest of the state), which means we have no more than 130 years data to look at. Yes, that is longer than a human lifespan, but it isn’t surprising that there would be trend lines that we would see — our records don’t stretch back far enough to give us sufficient perspective. Trend lines are interesting…but they are not shocking — the data set isn’t all that long.

[phoenixvoice]

White House dog bites
What turns my head is the idea that with all of that money, influence, and power that the white house inhabitants can’t seem to acquire a dog that has been sufficiently trained to occupy a home that is forever being frequented by people with whom the dog is not acquainted. This seems to be very basic to the understanding of how dogs view the world. Every time someone new comes to my home I know that I must introduce my mid-sized dog, and ensure that the dog knows that this person is accepted by me, so that he, too, accepts the individual. He isn’t prone to biting anyone (except houseflies, whom he swallows,) but the slim possibility is there when someone new walks through the door, and I’m aware of this. People who are neither going to take the time to train and get to know their own dog, nor going to pay for someone else to train the dog, should not keep dogs.

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I noticed a legacy media article yesterday about the “heat wave” in Phoenix. Yes, it is hot here. This heat is *normal.* The top temperature so far is only 119F. I’ve been here summers throughout the last 20 years when we got up past 123F. The heat is oppressive…but usual. The entire summer here is a “heat wave,” every year. I look forward to the brief, torrential rain from summer monsoon, as it will temporarily take the temperatures down into the 80s, even 70s sometimes.

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Yikes, Raul — it sounds like the temps there are nearly up to Phoenix temps. But here, we expect it, and I know that every year my electric bill in July/August will be quadruple or more what it is in December. Is air conditioning ubiquitous in Greece? And what is the humidity like?

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Nanny cam dog

That is hilarious! But I have a difficult time believing the framing…. (REALLY? The nice, shiny, upright piano is left with the keyboard cover open and the bench left pulled out, rather than tucked under, in a household where enough music is played and sung at said piano with enough regularity that the dog would voluntarily do this? I think not.)

My own dog often “sings” (howls) along when I play piano or sing…it is usually adorable, but sometimes annoying. He especially enjoys joining in on singing exercises.

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Ian Plimer also has an agenda
He says that CO2 from fossil fuel burning, from human application is taken up by trees, and already is “net zero”…so the “extra” CO2 is from animal exhalations and releases from the ocean.
This is illogical.
I don’t know much about Plimer; I don’t know his agenda. However, instead of speaking truth, he is taking generalized data and framing it in a way to fit his own narrative. This is no different than what the Davis crowd is doing — he just has a different agenda.

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Guardian article about RFKJ…

The plea at the end of the article:
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you would consider taking the step of supporting the Guardian’s journalism.
Not!

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Try that in a small town
We know that in large cities — San Francisco, in particular — many crimes, such as those listed in the song, are not being prosecuted. The song suggests that these crimes will not be tolerated by small town communities. Nothing in the lyrics posted on TAE suggests anything about the color of the skin of the person committing the crimes. So why is it that the Woke folks assumed that the song was about lynching, which was historically pointed towards blacks? Why are the Woke so quick to presume that the person committing the crime is black? It seems that, here, the Woke are stoking the flames of racism, while the song is talking about behavior — something which *can* be controlled — not skin color, which is intrinsic.

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SEE article posted by Red…
One of the obvious ways to reduce resource use without reducing quality of life significantly is to repair broken things. Of course, to do this well means shifting the way items are produced to make repair more do-able….

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Okay, fine, chickens have family, or “tribes.” However, in my observations over nine years, when one dies, fallen to the ground in the chicken yard or coop, the flock does not appear to be bothered in any way.

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Misgendering has been referred to as an “act of violence” at some U.S. universities.

As someone who knows what it is like to be triggered to re-experience past trauma, and how it can powerfully affect current behavior and mental well-being, I understand the urge to protect vulnerable people — victims — from those who would bully them.

But…

The path through healing sufficiently from trauma lies through the triggers, not by crafting a life that avoids them.

I don’t care what very important people say…

Verbal abuse, though psychically painful, is not violence.
Emotional abuse, though psychically painful, is not violence.

Yes, people who have experienced verbal and emotional abuse need to escape the abuse and find safe space in order to become grounded and start healing — but they do not need to perpetually live inside a safe bubble. To do so is to not truly live.

So, “misgendering” is not usually a form of bullying, not usually a form of abuse. It is often simply a reflection of physical reality or ignorance on the part of the speaker of someone’s pronoun preference. Since we cannot be certain what is going on in the mind of another, it is often impossible to ascertain in any given moment whether the “misgendering” was intended as emotional/verbal abuse or was simply normal conversation. Calling attention to physical reality — i.e. biological sex characteristics — through pronoun use is a form of speaking objective truth.

My thoughts on misgendering: stop expecting the world to create a safe bubble for you! If you feel vulnerable, go find a community where you feel welcome and safe, and spend enough time there to tank up on all of those feel-good emotions. Choose how much time you want to interact with the rest of the world. When you interact with society at large, don’t expect it to cater to your personal emotional vulnerabilities. That is what your “safe space” community is for.

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I’ve been camping in the Coconino forest the last few days. Yesterday, to escape the afternoon heat (above 95 F here — of course, in Phoenix it is getting to at least 115 F — exploring via the car means air conditioning!) we explored Sunset Crater National Monument and the Waputki Pueblo ruins about 15 miles away. It is believed that natives settled in the area of the ruins when the area that became Sunset Crater began rumbling and shaking and spewing out steam, and the people living there fled for their lives. Subsequently, the volcano created an enormous cinder cone and lava flowed out from its base. At the ruins the temperature was over 100 F and there were no visible sources of water. We asked the ranger about the scarcity of water. Apparently, the agreement by experts is that a thousand years ago instead of only sage brush, scrub, and spindly juniper trees, this area was a grassland with natural springs, etc.

The “climate” is ever changing. Sometimes, human activity affects it. Most of the time, changes occur due to natural forces completely outside of human control. Regardless, it behooves us to minimize the poisons that we pour out around ourselves. And then there is the stupidity of injecting ourselves directly with poisons….

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It wouldn’t be all that difficult to verify whether or not the old man in the White House really is Joe Biden. A little hair is needed — perhaps just a recently used cup, one sample from “Biden” and one from a close relative.

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Dr D
. If there’s coal under your peasant’s house, get a solicitor to make something up to chuck them out. When you break all laws and contracts like that, erasing all legal property rights, it’s “Capitalism

Which is why it is helpful to clearly delineate the differences between economic systems and political systems. Sure, if capitalism is a virtue and is defined as purely following self interest in the economic sphere, it makes sense to use any means, legal or not, to get at the coal. Which is why we need a political system that respects rights of individuals and traditional property laws (which vary greatly from place to place, and age to age,) rather than being primarily beholden only to whomever has the most wealth, popularity, or guns.

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To potentially prosecute a parent for refusing to use an adopted pronoun of their child is chilling and wrong. Nevertheless, a CPS spokesperson doubled down with a comment to Fox News that “domestic abuse is a severe crime and leaves victims with a lasting impact . . . This assists prosecutors to ensure that any victim, regardless of who they are, can get justice for the abuse they have faced.”

Here is the most ridiculous part of this:

Currently, it is nearly impossible to get CPS or a family court to pay attention to verbal and/or emotional abuse of children by parents. I gave “very important,” family-court-appointed people specific examples of verbal and emotional abuse of my children by their father. They were uninterested. Within a couple weeks of the “graduated parenting time” implemented by the court for my kids to see their father more and more over the course of six months, I saw marked changes in their behavior and demeanor. No one with any real influence over the situation paid any attention to my observations. Now, as teens, my kids sometimes open up and tell me what they were thinking and feeling and experiencing then, and now, at their father’s home. It isn’t pretty. Two of my kids struggle with depression. (Not formally diagnosed — this is their own observation of their own self.) My daughter sometimes harms herself. And all I can do is offer support — I am powerless to change their living arrangements.

Here’s the fun part: it seems that, generally, family court and CPS are not interested in verbal/emotional abuse because it is (a) difficult to prove and (b) common for disgruntled parents to accuse each erroneously of verbal and emotional abuse. For example: one year after the kids started spending more time with their father, and I noticed these things, he filed legal papers accusing me of neglect as well as verbal/emotional abuse of the children. He lost, because his allegations were unfounded, and conversations with the children proved it. But, he wasn’t asked to pay my legal fees and he was only asked to fund half of the costly custody study.

So now, suddenly, our society is going to elevate a *special* type of verbal/emotional abuse — misgendering — as somehow more sacrosanct and damaging than any other type of abuse?? They are insane. My daughter has a female friend who wants to use they/he pronouns and for people to alternate between “they” and “he” regularly in conversation. Some people don’t even possess the mental acuity to attempt to do this, let alone succeed. And the girl’s parents? They are great people, salt-of-the-earth types, and the continue to use female pronouns and the girl’s given name.

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Homeless pet vet

How amazing to see a vet who will touch a pet in front of the human companion. Vets used to do this. I can’t find one that does anymore. During Covid, vet techs started taking pets to the vet in the back, and later the vet comes out to discuss findings with the human companions. I am very uncomfortable with this. I don’t know these people, and I feel responsible to ensure for my pet that the animal navigates safely the human world. Just because someone work in a veterinarian office does not mean that they won’t abuse my pet — once out of my sight, my pet cannot communicate with me what happens. How am I supposed to trust that a vet knows what is going on with my pet when I cannot witness the interaction between my pet and the vet?

I was told by an office manager at a local veterinarian that now it is for legal, not sanitation issues. Apparently there was a legal case where a pet being attended to by a vet bit its human companion, and the human sued the vet. I don’t know the particulars of the legal case…but this is being used as a pretext to create a situation where vets work behind closed doors. I am sure that, eventually, many pets will be abused by this model. When we create situations without natural oversight of vulnerable beings by humans who care for them and are bonded to them, corruption will enter, and the vulnerable will be exploited.

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Teens — consent

I have three teens, 17, 17, and 15.
In some areas of their lives they each have very strong opinions and ideas. In other areas of their lives they haven’t decided, haven’t thought it through, don’t have the experience or information at hand. Or, they just aren’t ready to shoulder the responsibility in that area of life. One son, when asked where he wants to go to college looks at me and says: Where do you think I should go, mom?, but he manages high school classes flawlessly. Another, when faced with when getting his medicine each night (he has EOE): Will you do it mom? , but he desires full autonomy in deciding his daily schedule and will happily ride his electric scooter to the grocery store for something he wants. My daughter fixes herself all of her meals, except for cooking steak and chicken: Mom, will you cook me 8 oz of chicken?. She is happily immersed in her visual arts and crafts since I picked them up from their dad’s Friday evening.

They aren’t adults yet. In some areas of life they can consent, but not in all. Each one is unique, and it takes a caring adult to get to know each one well enough to determine where they are ready to make their own decisions, a when they just need a little support, and when they lack the experience or judgment. Additionally, such an adult needs to gain sufficient trust that the teen is willing to ask for guidance and submit to the adult’s authority without coercion. An approach that suggests teens can consent in all areas of life is an approach designed to exploit the naïveté of teens.

Younger children require even more input and support from a caring adult.

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