After a drizzly start on Saturday, the holiday weekend morphed into sheer perfection. I took advantage by trimming, caulking, painting, and planning the layout of gutters.
Now I’m beat. I need to spend a day paying bills, catching up on email, cleaning house, and other non-building matters. But the weather gods say we have just three days of sunny skies before five days of rain. Back outside I go. Back up and down the ladder. Back into drippy paint and ooey glue and bending those nails that don’t want to be hammered into unlikely places. Back to the twisty physical punishment of working under eaves.
I whine inwardly and try to make up excuses to call The Wandering Monk back to do the worst of this. But I can do it. I have to do it. I should do it myself. Oh lord, though, I am wearing out and wearing down.
I apologize for making the blog “all construction all the time” lately. That won’t be for too much longer.
The exterior of the house will be done soon and then I’ll probably be bored and wonder what to do with myself besides watch the rain fall. But that should mean more meaty blogitude.
I’m dreading these three promised sunny days.
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Anyhow, while I’m out there twisting into a pretzel to caulk around soffits and fascia boards, have a few links, several of them blessedly on the “lite” side.
- When pictures are worth more than 1,000 words.
- When that Chicago cardinal said the pope should be more concerned about climate change and protecting migrants than the Vatican’s eternal abuse scandals, I thought maybe it was just some eejit’s random view. But nope. The pontiff himself, who won’t utter a word lately about generations of Catholic children being abused by priests and the ever-higher-level coverups has more important emergencies on his mind.
- Sounds like a fun new novel from Charles Hugh Smith: starring “consulting philosopher” Cavelock Victor Oliver. (My Amazon link to the book. Very reasonable prices.)
- From Quillette: “Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation?”
- Nineteen pix for dog lovers.
If the pope were to assign certain priests to “environmental clean-up duty” 12 hours a day every day, they’d be tired enough that he could solve both problems while still pretending not to know about the scandal.
Not the best solution, I’d rather the guilty priests be in prison. Or left shackled in a room with an angry parent and a baseball bat. But if he’s going to raise all this fuss about the environment, he could at least use it as a way to shunt bad priests away from congregations.
On ‘safetyism”:
On the physical aspect of that, it has been illuminating to go through a stack of Reminisce magazines I found. One story was about a man who, when he was a teenager in the 1930s, spent his summer vacations traveling around the country like a hobo, hitchhiking and hopping freight trains. He started doing that at age 14, with his mother’s blessing.
Another was a 1913 photo of two boys on an Indian motorcycle. They were the Abernathy brothers, ages 13 and 9. They traveled from Oklahoma to New York City. 1750 miles, by themselves, in what was probably a promotional tour for the motorcycle brand.
These days, letting kids that young travel by themselves like that would be considered child endangerment, with criminal charges against the parents.
A new day care center opened in my town. They advertise that they care for kids aged 6 weeks to 14 years. Since when does a 14-year-old need a babysitter? When I was that age, we could BE the babysitters, taking care of very young children.
You get what you expect. Expect people to act like immature idiots well into their 20s, and that’s what happens.
With concerns of past generational abuse within the catholic church, let us not forget that there is far more sexual abuse (of girls AND boys) inside the public school system going on to this day. If you claim to love your children- get them out of public schools now. Even if they escape that public prison system without being abused, their capacity for critical thinking and free-market motivations will be damaged.
Seems to me that Safeytism really got a start in the Clinton era. A USAF guy is a hero for being successful in using his SERE training after being shot down during his bombing in Serbia. He’s safe! That’s heroic! Nope; he was just doing what he was trained to do.
Then, after the Atlanta Olympics bombing, an ABC poll found that some 53% of respondents would be willing to give up some freedoms in return for more security.
Add to this the unending propaganda about safety and security–and then consider the unending expansion of authority for the Child Welfare people and their growing lists of endangerment.
Decades of anti-gun yak-yak in the schools plus Zero Tolerance of normal behavior.
Add it all up and you wind up with safe zones and snowflakes.
I love the doggie ones! Articles like the safetyism one, and just real life experience makes me all the more glad that I’m old and got to grow up when I did.
Seems to me that Safeytism really got a start in the Clinton era. (1993-2001)
Neighbors who lived down the block in Nebraska chastised us for not “childproofing” our home when our kids were eight and four. There were all kinds of commercial products they recommended, from gates to cabinet locks to electrical outlet covers to locking kitchen knife safes.
Their child started kindergarten the next year, and it was a disaster. If nothing else was available, the kid got bruised running into unpadded surfaces.
This was in 1980-81.
Then there’s The Surprising Origins of Child-Proof Lids
http://mentalfloss.com/article/54410/surprising-origins-child-proof-lids
And no, I don’t remember the Mayans.
If the pope were to assign certain priests to “environmental clean-up duty”
IMHO the best way to deter pedophiles from joining your organization is to have an unyielding policy of immediately turning abusers over to law enforcement and cooperating with their prosecution. Any form of coverup is equivalent to pedo recruitment.
It looks like the Mayans knew what to protect!
Ah, Claire, you have nothing for which to apologize. I can watch someone else work all day long, and your construction posts allow me to do that from two-thirds of a continent away. The three sunny days: I would encourage you to take a few breaks for an hour or two therein. We humans require the occasional respite: physical, mental, and spiritual. They’ll help you to be more efficient when you are working.
Thanks for the Consulting Philosopher link … sort of. At the ridiculously cheap price he’s asking, I believe I’ll have to download it to my Kindle, which increases my Reading Backlog Guilt. I just finished your and Kit’s first volume on resistance. And, by the way, I lost a bet with myself; I was sure I’d be able to tell which parts you wrote, and which parts she did, but I failed completely. My theory is that one or the other of you did the final editing by herself. Am I correct?
Yeah, probably not. What else is new?
When my first child was born I childproofed the whole house and the little bugger STILL got in!
No argument, Larry, but I was thinking more in terms of a nationwide cult dedicated to a Ralph Nader world.
My theory is that one or the other of you did the final editing by herself. Am I correct?
You got it.
Kit and I have very different writing styles. So I made the final editing pass to harmonize style and content. Then she did all the layout and making-ready for Amazon.
And don’t worry; I’m taking breaks. Big ones. Alas, I’m also finding that three hours in the a.m. then another two or three after the heat of the day are enough to pretty much wipe me out. The work is physically difficult and I’m not as robust as I was even a few short years ago. Sigh. But thank you. I’m glad to know you’re supervising from a safe distance. 🙂
Addendum to my earlier comment:
That 1913 motorcycle trip wasn’t the only journey made by the Abernathy brothers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Abernathy_and_Temple_Abernathy
They made several long trips without adult supervision, including a trip from Oklahoma to New York by horseback in 1910 when they were 10 and 6, and a cross-country horseback trip in 1911.
Kids did that over 100 years ago, but now we are told that adolescence extends into the mid-20s because the brain is still developing until that age. Then why did people like these brothers mature faster back then? (sarcasm)
How far we have fallen.
“IMHO the best way to deter pedophiles from joining your organization is to have an unyielding policy of immediately turning abusers over to law enforcement and cooperating with their prosecution. Any form of coverup is equivalent to pedo recruitment.”
I agree. Personally, I think the entire papal hierarchy should be charged as accomplices. Is that likely to happen? Nope.
Giving the priests involved some kind of hard labor would have allowed the pope to pretend he cared about kids while still saving face. The fact that he does absolutely nothing makes him an accomplice in more than just the cover-up, IMO.