Last Day of My Fund-Raising Week. A Gratitude Post.

Cool slithery snake energy* to all who have donated already!   There's still time!

If I were good at the self-marketing business, I would paint myself as the last bulwark (like that word!) against the chaos of multiple Jordan Petersons, the last tiny sane voice online, the last person mutilating the English language on a daily basis, the last goddess still being worshiped.

But I am terrible at marketing.  So just give already.  Don't give if you have no money.  You can tell me how wonderful I am instead.

More seriously, my thanks to you all, both for reading, for thinking, for educating me, for arguing,  and for giving me chocolate money.

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* This can be used for health or for avoiding tricky situations or even for getting boring chores to go faster.

On Lobsters, Dragons And Witches. More Jordan Peterson!

This is a good article on Jordan Peterson and on  his slightly-inebriated-prophet style of speaking and thinking. 

Peterson is the adored father figure of zillions of young conservative (mostly white) men, because he tells them that patriarchal hierarchies are fair, based on competence and that women are biologically unsuited to climb them.

That removes half the competition.  Then all those men need to do is to clean their rooms, stand straight, and speak the truth.  That last bit seems to include telling women that they belong at home.

If you would like to learn more about Prophet Peterson, this is a good first post.  My three-part book review of his best-selling tome begins here.

Day Six of My Fund-Raising Week: On Bolton's Smart Choices And Trump's Smart Utterances.

1.  The midterm elections are coming.  It's therefore logical that 

The White House eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council on Tuesday, doing away with a post central to developing policy to defend against increasingly sophisticated digital attacks and the use of offensive cyber weapons.

A memorandum circulated by an aide to the new national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the post was no longer considered necessary because lower-level officials had already made cybersecurity issues a “core function” of the president’s national security team.
Cybersecurity experts and members of Congress said they were mystified by the move, though some suggested Mr. Bolton did not want any competitive power centers emerging inside the national security apparatus.
The decision was criticized by Mark R. Warner, a senator from Virginia and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I don’t see how getting rid of the top cyber official in the White House does anything to make our country safer from cyber threats,” he wrote on Twitter.

Bolton may, indeed, have higher priorities than the security of US elections (such as being the biggest fish in his pond), especially when the likely outsider influence would not hurt his party.   But yeah, he may also not be aware of the severity of cyber threats.

But whatever Bolton's rationalizations might be, this particular decision looks awful to those who prefer democracy to dictatorships or kleptocracies.

2.   And the president of the United States speaks.  If it's possible to return to a more adult and courteous political discourse one day, this era will provide rich mining for those who wish to do doctoral theses on the worst statements of American presidents.  That's the silver lining to the Trump cloud.

3.   A picture of my pear galette should go here, to make you more likely to give me your hard-earned moneys.  But alas, it has been eaten.

Instead, have a cat picture

Day Five of The Fund-Raising Week. What You Don't Know Can't Hurt You?

1.  Here's another of those hidden foundation cracks the Trump administration is causing by demolishing the government:

The Trump administration has killed NASA's Carbon Monitoring System, which was responsible for compiling data from separate satellite and aircraft measurements of CO2 and methane emission across the Earth.
This program allowed scientists to have a picture of the flow of carbon all over Earth.
...

This move will make it harder for nations to be able to verify that quotas are being met according to the promises in the Paris climate accords. Every nation on Earth, except the US, is part of the accord.

This is acting like a father/mother who does not wish to know about his/her child's high fever so destroys the thermometer.  Well, actually it's worse, because it is all about short-term profit at the expense of the future survival of human civilizations.