Food Shortages Are Coming
Many Americans are unaware of how much of their food comes from California. They think California is just two or three big cities, and ignore the fact that it is a largely agricultural state, supplying nearly 70% of the nation's fruits and vegetables. If the Republican regime succeeds in its goal of destroying California's agriculture, the entire country will experience shortages and higher prices. In addition to providing your fruit and veggies, California produces about 20% of U.S. dairy products and about 80% of the country's fresh cut flowers. If the workers are driven off, tons of valuable food will sit in the fields and rot. Imported fruit, already expensive, will experience extreme price increases driven by tariffs.
Random Thoughts
Big Fishes Eat Small Ones, 1556, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
If an envelope that comes in the mail says "Important information" on the outside, that's a sure sign that it is extremely UNinmportant.
Here's one of those things I see on TV that is so unlike real life I start yelling at the screen. A person comes home at night, enters the house or apartment. It's dark, but they don't turn on the light! They wander through the dark house into the kitchen for a drink (still in the dark) or into the living room to just sit on the couch in the dark. If it's a crime show, there's a killer lurking in the house who ambushes them in the dark. Or some unpleasant person from their past (with remarkable burglar skills) is in the house and surprises them with sarcastic remarks. Or their roommate has already been murdered and they stumble over the body in the dark. In any case, why didn't they just turn on the damn lights?!!?
People keep saying, X is a distraction from Y. But, really, they are doing both X and Y because those are both things they want to do. Doing everything all at once is not a distraction, it is a strategy to overwhelm us.
I just don't understand the mentality that looks at uber-rich people and says, "We need to give these guys more money."
If a religion can be damaged by someone's disbelief or satire, then it is too weak to benefit anyone.
Imagine the mind of someone who wants to make poor people poorer, hopes to see more children die, looks forward to increasing the number of homeless people, wants health care workers to be unemployed, and likes the spread of infectious diseases.
Random Thoughts
Someone who really believed in "America First" would want America to be first in education, to have the finest and most prestigious academies and universities and the most well educated population. Wanting America to be "First" would mean wanting excellent public education available to all.
It is horrifying to me to see how often "peace officers" are unable to control their emotions and will start screaming and using threatening body language toward civilians over trivialities or imaginary incidents.
What kind of country turns the military against its own citizens? What kind of government arrests people for asking questions?
Someone who really believed in "America First" would want America to be the healthiest nation. That would mean making great health care accessible to all. It would mean supporting medical research, having excellent hospitals, employing the best professionals, educated here and recruited from abroad.
There were countries I didn't visit, because they were dangerous for tourists. Now I live in one.
Someone who really believed in "America First" would want us to be first in science and technology. This would mean promoting excellent public education, encouraging universities and industries to perform high-quality research, and attracting the best minds both from home and abroad.
Someone who really believed in "America First" would take pride and pleasure in our great national parks and public lands. This would mean embracing the responsibility to care for and preserve our unique natural resources, keeping them safe now and for the future.
Death Without Dignity
Think about these matters for a minute.
We are all encouraged to have a will - a document that directs how our property will be distributed or disposed of after we die. A person's right to control their property, even after death, is legally recognized and traditionally honored.
Most societies consider it important to treat the dead with respect. That includes, not only a deceased person's property, but also their physical remains. Desecration of a corpse is considered especially detestable. Abusing, mishandling, or improperly disposing of a corpse carries both civil and criminal penalties.
When it comes to organ donation (using a person's body and its parts after death), once again, we are encouraged to express our wishes prior to death. If a person has not given permission for their organs to be used by other people, then it is illegal to use those organs. In some cases, family members are permitted to grant permission ater the person's death, but, in any event, it remains illegal to take organs, or to use a body in medical research or experimentation, without proper permission.
Traditionally, grave robbing - taking a body out of its grave - is considered a particularly vile crime. In times past, professional grave robbers would supply freshly dead bodies to medical schools where they were dissected for the purpose of teaching anatomy and surgery. This practice was widely condemned, and laws were enacted to control the acquisition of cadavers and to ensure that bodies used in medical education would eventually receive a dignified burial or cremation.
Unfortunately, we now find ourselves living in a society where some people are no longer allowed the respect and dignity that comes with making one's own choices regarding the handling and use of the body after death. Specifically, there is a trend to treat women as less than fully human, a lower caste of beings who do not enjoy the same rights as men when it comes to basic decisions regarding their own bodies. For some time, there have been persons openly advocating for the use of female corpses in bizarre medical experiments. Until recently, one might expect that a woman, just like a real person, could choose to grant - or not - permission for her body to be used in research and experimentation, and that, in the absence of such permission, her remains would be handled and disposed of in accordance with her and her family's wishes. In the year 2025, this is not true.
A woman who happens to be pregnant at the time of death may end up as a sort of living corpse, her body connected to machines that force some of her organs to continue functioning, so that her body can be used as an incubator for the nonviable fetus that, under normal circumstances, would have died with her. This has just been done to the remains of a woman who did not give permission for organ donation or medical research, against the wishes of family members who wanted her to be treated with dignity.
As it happens, in this case, the mad-scientist experiment seems to have succeeded, in that an extremely premature infant, weighing less than two pounds, was extracted from the woman's body and placed in intensive care. Infants delivered at this stage have about a 10% chance of survival and, if they survive, are likely to face severe medical problems.
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