Ooooo. You know, that would have been painful, had it not been so entirely off base. Thanks for the laugh…

“The provisions make it difficult to run a business efficiently and provide adequate customer service,” said the sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Sherri Gallick, R-Belton. “The unpredictability threatens the stability of businesses, large and small.”

If that is the case, how is it that businesses, small and large, manage it in every other country in the world except the US, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Somalia for G-d’s sake! I mean, these people are just one step up from Somalia, where there is no sick leave at all!

Um… if you look at the post again, you will find that the doctor in question is a PhD, admittedly in neuroscience, which does produce results used by medical doctors. But there is no indication the woman in question has ever, or will ever, practise medicine in a clinical setting. For that matter, there is only the inference from the mention of a US podcast that she is even American, mmm?

But, then, I infer from your userrname that you are male, and from your post that you are American. So I am not, at this point in history, terribly surprised if you have jumped to a wrong conclusion about the actual content of a woman’s doctorate.

Signed, another woman with a doctorate that has nothing whatsoever to do with practising medicine in the USA, although you’d never know it from the number of Americans who immediately tell me their symptoms upon introduction. (Ah, yes! I think Napoleon died of something similar on Ste. Helena. Or possibly he was poisoned. But then French history is not my field, either.)

No need. Just invest 10% of that amount in McDonald’s gift cards that expire at the end of April and wait for nature to take its course. Send the other 90% to Luigi to share with his prison mates.

Yeah. Sure. Measles can actually destroy the immune system so that it forgets not only that you have had measles, but everything else you’ve developed an immunity to (it’s called immune amnesia) by having the disease or having a vaccine, and face getting the whole mob again. Or, you could be the 1 or 2 people in 1000 who will die, or the 1 in 1000 who will get encephalitis and live, albeit significantly intellectually and physically disabled. Or you could get subacute sclerosing panencephalitis ten years after you had measles, and that’s almost always fatal.

Makes getting shingles after having chicken pox as a kid seem like a walk in the park, mmm?

The Guardian, The Tyee, BBC, CBC, Reuters and AP, with a dash of utterly unreliable press from abroad.

Ay! Oy!

It seems to take more keywords to home in on the kind of speciality items I look for, and does not always appear to detect connections between those keywords, for example in trying to find certain kind of veterinary support devices made to national specifications. One of the other commentors says Kagi is okay for shopping, so maybe I’ll give it a whirl because I’d love to be free of Google once and for all.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

I’m interested, but a bit reluctant. I find DuckDuckGo quite adequate for most things, except shopping online, something that I have to rely on for certain categories of items. How is Kagi on shopping?

I remember seeing the coverage at the time, and saying to a colleague that Ukraine was making a huge mistake. He scoffed at the idea a middle-aged woman, even one with degrees in highly relevant fields, could grasp geopolitics. And now I’m an old woman, thinking quietly, ‘X, you were an idiot then, and you are an idiot now.’

You were born into a highly social species. The basis of human society (and that of many other social species) is co-operation and mutual aid to increase the individual’s chance of survival and reproduction, make life for group members easier and, at least since Neanderthals and Denisovians, longer, rather than, as Thomas Hobbes opined “nasty, brutish and short”. While it is quite true that there are those who game the system to reap more than their share of the benefits while giving less or nothing back, overall, those who give more are more likely to ‘earn’ the respect of their fellows and gain the help they need to live as well as possible within whatever circumstances they find themselves.

Don’t be too sure that the evil face no consequences. Until their book is finished and closed, you cannot know they will not wish once more to ride down the slope on Rosebud. I knew a woman who was the head nurse on a terminal ward for years – to this day, I don’t know how she did it. She told me one evening that, in all those years, no one had ever died wishing they’d made more money or achieved greater power, but many of the elite that passed through her ward died alone.

Thanks: that’s gonna take some practise!

As an old Canadian socialist with the lumps to prove it, I agree. There is so much performance, and so little action. I spend time on reddit, trying to get keyboard warriors to understand that posting an opinion will not magically cause the fascist Administration to collapse and get a lot of “The media refuses to cover us!” bullpuckey. There are thousands of newsrooms in the USA that are not owned by billionaire tech bros or MAGA devotees (see, for example https://www.trustworthymedia.org/ › list-of-independent-media ) and most social media is still wide open to pictures and facts about your actions. If you are acting, let the independent media – most but not all of whom are progressive, check first – know and post your pictures (faces blurred if need be) and stories everywhere you can reach people.

Meantime, buy Canadian, buy local, or don’t buy at all, at least it’s something!

Alone: separate, apart, isolated from others; solo, without company; exclusively, uniquely; without aid or help. I don’t see anywhere in the definitions in the OED, Merriam-Webster, or at Dictionary.com where it says your allies and/or companions have to be capable of winning the war alone. Most of the countries in the Empire declared war within 24 hours to one week after Britain did. The fact we lost tons of materiel and human lives to German submarines suggests rather strongly that, far from being alone, Britain was receiving materiel and soldiers well; before D-Day, The reality is that the partisans and resistance fighters, the colonial soldiers, the other nations also fighting on their fronts were all part of the same anti-Nazi alliance: Britain was emphatically not alone. It simply had the best orator and propagandist at the head of its government.

And, yes, you are right about the majority of Indian deaths being civilian. I admit I have always considered them with the soldiers because so many of them died of starvation when Britain confiscated their food for its own people.

I’ll do this starting NOW, if someone will just post a pronunciation guide! Please?

I do wish people would stop with the “Britian stood alone.” stuff. Even before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, there were Allies fighting all over the world, resistance movements in every single continental European country, famously France, but also the Nederlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The entire British Empire was at war, either based in Britain, as saboteurs on the continent, on fronts from east Asia to the Sahara – Canada, Newfoundland, Nepal, Australia, New Zealand – India alone lost 2 million fighters (look it up!), Burma, Malta, South Africa, Egypt, and southern Rhodesia. China did not just surrender blindly: before 1941, both Mao and Sun Yat-sen had armies fighting the Japanese which kept them from attacking the Soviet Union after Hitler turned. Mongolia and Korea never stopped fighting, either. Britain endured the Blitz, it is true, and Churchill certainly made some great speeches about ‘standing alone’ while he was sacrificing literally millions of ‘colonials’ to preserve his European troops. But it was, and is, propaganda.

True or not, one can avoid the whole issue by using your phone as a phone, maybe to send texts, with location, mike, and camera switched off permanently, and all the other apps deleted or disabled. Sure, Google will still know you called your SO daily and your Mom once a week (NOT ENOUGH!), and that you were supposed to pick up the dry cleaning last night (did you?). Meh. If that’s what floats the Surveillance Society’s boat, I am not too worried.

Thanks for clarifying that.

The person promoting adoption is presuming a right to impose his/her morality on others, being emotionally manipulative, and assuming human children have an inherent superiority over, say, an litter of kittens or puppies starving at the side of the road. Nah.

Morality is an individual choice. If you perform an act because someone else demands it, or because ‘it’s what’s done’, or because you want to be judged worthy, as Yeshua ben Yusuf said, you get your reward in the approval. If you do it because you believe it is the right thing to do, regardless of praise or opprobrium, that is a moral act. My morality says a life is a life and all lives are of equal value, because each gets only one, and it is the most precious thing in the universe to the one who lives it, whether tardigrade, garden slug, disabled pigeon or human child. Based on that and other principles I have evolved over a life, I have not had biological children, nor have I adopted a human child, quite deliberately. Perhaps, in his/her eyes, I am evil. Tant pis: I don’t answer to any conscience but my own.