Hear ye

[Housemate]

Specialist Subjects was created for those who would like to wax long and lovingly about a particular topic – kind of a blog within a blog. Chompsky was a natural for the ribbon nibbling in 2019. It has remained a wide open space, into which finally comes [drumroll please]........ another bunny thread. Call it rabbit redux.

Pssst. If you don't see the subtitles, go to YouTube and click CC

I make few concessions to being a rabbit. It's just a hook for another hat (sorry Chomps). I do think he'd make a fine advice columnist or AMA conduit for interspecies wisdom, but living in a niche (which frankly, he prefers to wide open spaces) has its downsides: most people are dog people or cat people, making this a tough sell. Or so my agent tells me.

Anyway, stay tuned.

[Chompsky]

Headed out of shot, as you can see. So many photo ops so little time. Still not sure where I'm going to,

but that's OK. Nobody does. Not really.

In related news, big bunny #1 (designated by size, not importance) spent yesterday frantically trying to get big bunny #2 seen by a private gastroenterologist pronto. He may have been alarmed by her new difficulty drinking any measure larger than a sip at a time, to add to the fact she's slowly starving to death. (Not to be dramatic or anything. What would you call it when you're continually unable to consume enough to stay at the same weight?) Also in the mix was the rather incredible way her NHS consultant had just treated her, assuming talking over her and not listening to what she said counts as incredible. Confidence was at 0 that he would be escorting her down the road to wellville.

I lost track of the number of calls made. Just as he was really getting into the swing of things, the secretary to what turned out to be a well known (except to him) specialist said a slot was available for a zoom consult that very afternoon. Hallelujah!

Cue a bit of fiddling with rarely used video capabilities.



For the first time since this nightmare began unfolding, hope is in the air.

[Housemate]

We lost our analog landline today.

While I'm glad to break free from the dreadful BT, it's still a sad day. Didn't need electricity (at our end at least) to make it work. A solid backup if ever there was one. We now have Voip technology, or will if we ever get around to getting a new phone, an adaptor, or figure out how to work it via the computer. Brave new world indeed.

[Chompsky]

The hidden cost of pronoun politeness

it’s about control.

There are polite lies that we tell all the time. Supporting someone else’s belief that they are the same sex as you — when clearly they are not — is not the same as laughing at someone’s bad jokes or saying their terrible haircut is lovely, all the while knowing they’d do the same for you. Deferring to someone else’s beliefs about how you both stand in relation to one another cannot be a reciprocal act. It is not the same as using a nickname. If you use “she” for a male person, then it ceases to apply exclusively to a female person; you are changing the meaning of yourself.

Sounds like neither.

[Housemate]

My wife has coeliac disease. Of this we are almost certain. It will never be proved, because there's no way on god's green earth she's eating gluten again, and the tests require a good dose of poison beforehand.

We're content to base this diagnosis on the knowledge we've acquired, and her experiences. She's now on the long path to healing, to the extent it's possible.

The 'hope is in the air' doc a few posts up was a bust, btw. I'm not going into details other than to say he was old school sexist.

You really do have to look out for yourself.

[Chompsky]

Dog walking & pet sitting not bringing in enough to cover the bills?



In case you missed it:

Sometimes in healing the animal will not experience any particular effects at all. Each experience is unique to the individual animal and does not indicate the quality of effectiveness of the healing energy.

Jude, meet Emily.

Oh, and

Jude currently has animals of her own including a dog, a cat and two African Land snails.

Hey Jude, my snail is sad
Could it be he needs some Reiki
To address his sluggish anxiety
Your healing hands can make it better

[Housemate]

There was a time I didn't care in the slightest about NASCAR [National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. If you didn't know that, you have no political future for national office in the US.] Now I'm completely in agreement with localhost_void that "out of control regulations destroy any kind of out of the box thinking leading to ingenuity and invention driven by necessity", which is of course an outrage. All thanks to Josh Fruhlinger.

[Chompsky]

10 Totally "Looney" Facts about Wagner and the Ring cycle

“Ride of the Valkyries” and several other opera melodies were also used in the Looney Tunes classic “What’s Opera, Doc?” where Bugs Bunny played a leporine Brünnhilde and Elmer Fudd played an aggressive Siegfried. This episode introduced a new generation to opera, and many still sing along with the lyrics “Kill da wabbit.” Interesting note: it was also selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.”

[Housemate]

Cute Authoritarianism? Say it ain't so!

[Chompsky]

Both rainbow identity politics and Maoist Communism share a belief in the child born without the taint of history, identity or – today – even gender: an idealised child, a blank page that can have revolutionary purpose written upon it. The important thing is to get to the children early, so that the new revolutionary message becomes engrained before the old order has a chance to instil its outdated, oppressive hegemonic values.

The rainbow flag itself is an expression of this idealisation of childhood innocence, of hope for all the world, in much the same way as the Red Flag stood for a new world rising from the blood of the old. Mao too was depicted using a sky metaphor – as the rising sun.

As in communist kitsch, rainbow identity activism’s deliberate use of cuteness blurs the distinction between childhood and adulthood. This can be valuable when consenting adults do this in order to play with identity and challenge the predetermined rules of adulthood. But it is more sinister when the purpose is to influence children...

Dissident Milan Kundera, who fled communist Czechoslovakia in 1969, once heard a speech in which a communist leader declared, “Children, you are the future.” He comments:

today I realise he did not mean it the way it sounded. The reason children are the future is not that one day they will be grownups. No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy and childhood is the image of the future.

Whether it is done by activist groups, nudge units, advertisers, the transhumanists of Big Tech, the military or big government, cuteness is no longer innocent: it has become strategic and coercive. It is the attempt to compel us into being as malleable as little children. New forms of power are now evolving, and they are using cuteness to mask their real purposes. We need to confront their real agendas directly. It’s high time we stripped away the veneer of cuteness from the authoritarianism that is on the rise, all around us.