SUPPRESSION VESUS CONFESSION

As I am a poor, pathetic victim of “shadow banning” I know that by now some brainless “search engine analog” no longer needs to even read my posts before suppressing them. Sad. In the old days I could get a bit of satisfaction from the thought some geek, perhaps in China, was reading my sonnets and being uplifted. Even as I got cancelled, I might be uplifting the cancellers. Sigh. Now the cancelling is done by a robot.

This is the bizarre war we are midst. Little old me, a minor voice with rather odd views, is deemed some sort of threat by somebody somewhere. The powers of suppression rear their might to supress my self-expression.

Not going to happen. I will express my love of Truth and of the creation that Truth created even from a jail cell. So, what the suppressers actually want to suppress is the chance I might convert anyone to my rather odd views. They are not doing it for me they are doing it for you.

However, while there is indeed some selfishness involved in my self-expression, it is not entirely selfish. To be marginalized and cancelled is in some ways helpful, for solitude can be helpful. At times I do my best singing in the solitude of the shower. However even in the shower I do not sing to myself. I am unabashingly belting out my heartfelt rhapsody to an imaginary audience. But who? Maybe God. But maybe I’m doing it for you.

Poor you. On one hand you have the oppressors oppressing me for your sake, and on the other you’ve got my howling my odd songs for your sake. In other words, you have a two-party system, and you are in the shoes of the voter.

It has occurred to me that my microcosm resembles the macrocosm of the current war between Biden and Trump. However, Trump is much smarter than me, and plays his cards better. He is basically driving Biden nuts.

Oppressors, by their very nature, want to oppress some view or another. And Biden did want to suppress the ghastly views made available by his son’s laptop. The media was informed by the FBI the laptop was “Russian disinformation” although the FBI knew it was genuine, and the weak-willed mainstream media then compliantly reported it was “Russian disinformation.” Now it is years later, and, in the most watered-down way, the media wants to sneak an ironic admission that the media itself was the mis-informer, but only onto page 22 of Sunday editions, where no one will see.

Instead, a crowdsourced movie, “My Son Biden”, is to be released today, blaringly publicizing all the suppressed stuff in the laptop, in a manner which makes the corruption so ludicrous it is a comedy.

This surely makes Biden furious, and he apparently decided to send Trump a message, “You’re messing with the big boys, now.” So, he raided the sanctuary of Trump’s home, trashing even Trump’s wife’s and son’s bedrooms (and not tidying up afterwards), seeking some shred of evidence that it was Trump who oppressed Truth, by disobeying some unspecified law.

Unfortunately for Biden, this action was so oppressive it broke several laws, which resulted in Biden needing to oppress the fact he broke laws, which resulted in heavily redacted documents. So, Biden actually winds up oppressing himself. In like manner, the FBI is reduced from being a big bully, enforcing the oppression, to backtracking and attempting to oppress evidence it went forward illegally.

What a joke. The oppressor oppresses himself. In the words of Robert Lewis Stevenson, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.”

As the date of the movie’s release approached, Biden then tried a prime-time speech, trying to speak as a wise and kindly king against an unruly rebel, but the posing and posturing and lurid red background went over like a lead balloon. Rather than wise and kindly he came across as even more oppressive.

Nor did Trump appear the slightest bit intimidated. At a rally less than twenty-four hours later he delivered the ultimate insult: He never even mentioned Biden’s prime time speech. Instead, he focused in on all the issues Biden didn’t touch, in Biden’s prime-time speech.

I likely could go on about what Trump talked about that Biden didn’t mention, but why bother? When Biden doesn’t mention things, it is just another example of how he wants to oppress Truth.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the film exposing what was in the oppressed laptop is shown this week. “My Son Biden” can’t be cancelled as slander, first because Biden is a “public figure”, and second because such a lawsuit would have the laptop brought forward as evidence, and all it holds would become public knowledge, which is the last thing Biden wants.

Poor Biden. He is between a rock and a hard place.

Congratulations to Trump. He is proving an ancient spiritual truth is still true. Oppression loses to Confession, regarding the Truth.

And Me? I think this is one of the strangest wars History has ever seen.

SONNETS FROM SILENCE

Those who insist upon censoring all but fake-news miss the Truth, and Truth is Beauty. Therefore that which is beautiful is forced to go underground, where it whispers secrets in young lover’s ears, or from old men’s sonnets. Not that Truth ever ceases to exist. It is Real while fake-news is not, but ignorance is bliss for those pretentious people who prance and prattle in the limelight of a Titanic they deem unsinkable.

I am continuing to write in a sort of self-imposed silence. Not that I can ever stop the noise of my scribbling while I breathe, but I refrain from posting. My writing cannot be silenced when it is kept safely beyond reproach in a diary. However here are a couple sonnets that have escaped those hidden pages, while I was distracted by the drudgery of doing my taxes.

Enough with the taxes. I'm in the mood
To let my mind drift where it will; be led
By whim. Maybe predawn stars think I am rude
To stray from the course, but man is not fed
By being rigidly predictable
Like beautiful angels; they do God's will
Where men can't see It; whereas we are full
Of grand intents to serve sweet tea, but spill
Boiling brews in our customer's shocked laps.
That's just how we're made. And if God made us
That way, I'll be that way. Before dawn wraps
The east in roses, before yellow bus
Yanks tired kids from dreams to sit in rows,
I'll rope a dream and ride where it goes.

A mutter of thunder has meaning to me
As I wake in the misty, moist morning.
From illogical dreaming hearing can see
More that is joyous than warning.
It was only one grumble, and yet it spoke
Like a cleared throat before a pronouncement.
Like an eyebrow gone impish before a good joke
It foretold a happy announcement.
It hinted that warming awaits in the wings;
The cold will back down, and must bow.
Such thunder holds music which surely is Spring's
And a palm touches calm to my brow.
Like a child left too long all on his own
I hear front doors open. I am not alone.

UAH UNDER ATTACK BY GOOGLE GOONS

Actually, to quit the click-baiting, it is Dr. Roy Spencer’s site which is specifically degraded by Google, which has the utter audacity to call it “unreliable and harmful”. Dr. Spencer does a fine job of explaining his situation:

https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/01/unreliable-and-harmful-claims-this-website-has-been-demonetized-by-google/

Personally, I am far more irate than Dr. Spencer appears to be. I hardly know where to start. Some behavior is so outrageous one tends to sputter, unable to articulate their indignation, and Google’s absurd and basically juvenile behavior prompts that response in me.

To begin with, the UAH temperature record has been an island of reliability in a maelstrom of bias, for decades. Spencer and Christi had to put up with uproars from Alarmists each time the temperatures sank, and uproars from Skeptics each time temperatures rose. Through all the bludgeoning criticism, (one time they arrived at work to find a bullet hole in the plate-glass window of their office, several stories up in an office building,) they have been open and honest, and rather than fighting critics they actually seemed interested and inquiring. A few times over the past 43 years they even decided certain, specific criticisms had merit, and tweaked their formula at arriving at a “world-average-temperature”. This of course created further outrage, and sparked worries that they were “selling out”, but they were scrupulously open and above-board when they made adjustments, and swift to answer all questions and share all their calculations. (NOAA and NASA have not been so above-board about their “adjustments”.) Consequently, the UAH temperature record has become a trusted go-to resource for those interested in the world’s weather, and how the climate is fluctuating.

The primary criticism of UAH has been that temperature alone is not an adequate measure to use, in determining if the planet is heating, because water vapor distorts how much energy is involved in raising a parcel of air one degree, having differing powers at various locations. For example, a teaspoon of water turned into vapor would raise the temperature of a square meter of air far more at the Pole, at -40 degrees C, than that same teaspoon would do at the equator, at +35 degrees C. Most of the recent warming has occurred over the Poles. Perhaps air over the oceans is more moist, due to the PDO and AMO being in “warm” cycles, and therefore subpolar regions are more able to affect the Poles with moisture. However, the critical debate which this sparks is not banned by Spencer, and actually occurs at his site. Lastly, his numbers are not tweaked in any sort of nefarious way to arrive at a result he desires, but simply are what they are, with weaknesses and strengths in plain sight for everyone to see.

The situation was quite different at NASA, where James Hansen tweaked temperatures over a period of two decades in order to create a graph which confirmed his biased belief in Global Warming, and also conformed to his political puppeteer’s tugging at his strings of funding.

Charts from https://realclimatescience.com/corruption-of-the-us-temperature-record/

(Hansen apparently achieved this tweaking by going over the data collected by observers over the past 150 years and deeming certain observers unacceptable or unreliable, while others were allowed.)

Objective onlookers obviously regard Hansen’s records with a cocked eyebrow, while Spencer and Christi’s UAH record is regarded with respect, and as being more “reliable.”

The concern is not that Spenser is “unreliable”, but rather that Google is “unreliable.” If you worry about others falling from God’s grace into a hellhole, one should not worry about Spenser, but about the souls of Google goons.

In spiritual terms, to embrace the false is a complete disaster, for what you are embracing is not real; in the end it is a nothing. By definition, the false is not true; it is not real. Therefore, when people say, “The ends justify the means”, and use that motto as an excuse for their own dishonesty, the ones they are fooling most are themselves. What they clutch is a shadow, a zero with no substance.

Falsehood may appear to pay off in the short term. For example, the tough (but not particularly spiritual) baseball player and manager Leo Durocher purportedly stated, “Nice guys finish last,” but, in the end, Jesus stated, “The last will be first.” Therefore, in the end, “Nice guys finish first.”

The poor “useful idiots” at Google think they are winners by tweaking their search engines in ways that cloud the Truth, but what they are doing, by making Truth harder to find, is embracing falsehood. It will not end well for them.

For all the shortcomings the UAH temperature record may have, it attempts to be true, and therefore is a reliable metric, in terms of what it measures. Science is the effort of imperfect people to grasp a perfect Truth, and as long as they never dishonor Truth, scientists stand with saints. Spenser does not deserve the disrespect Google smears him with.

ARCTIC SEA-ICE –The Man-Eating Walrus–

Photo Credit: Joel Garlich-Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 

I confess the title of this piece is intended to be click-bait. Not that there is not such a thing as a man-eating walrus, but I am primarily aiming at undoing the damage done to me by censors in control of Google search engines, and sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Somebody somewhere has decided that there must be no questioning of the theory of Global Warming, and I apparently have been deemed such a questioner.

Not that I am able to adhere to the discipline of strictest science. Mostly, often in an intentionally silly way, I merely point out stupidities. The media makes little attempt to fact-check, when it comes to such politically correct narratives such as the theory of Global Warming, and it is quite easy for even a rank amateur such as myself to point out glaring inconsistencies between their narrative and recorded history. So, I have done so, often in a spirit of good-natured fun, and apparently made enough people chuckle so that even my silly posts might get 500 views, and one post even got 5000. But then the censorship hit, and now I’m lucky to get 50.

This seems unfair to me, and to violate Free Speech, and so on and so forth until I have worked myself into such a tizzy that I decide to fight fire with fire, and to utilize the irresistible click-bait of man-eating walruses. I figure this will overwhelm the capacity of analog censors to silence me, and I may reach a few people actually interested in sea-ice, besides the many who will be drawn by man-eating walruses.

I happen to know a thing or two about walruses because my mind has a strange capacity to absorb trivia, and trivia about trivia, and even trivia about trivia about trivia. Originally my interest was Greenland Vikings.

Greenland Vikings were able to raise several thousand cattle, and over a hundred thousand sheep and goats, on Greenland during the first decades after the year 1000. We can’t do that any more. This tidbit of history is a historical fact that the media failed to recognize, while touting the narrative that it is warmer now than it was in the Medieval Warm Period. It may indeed be the fact that got me censored.

But my further investigation of Greenland Vikings noticed they survived even when their cattle, sheep and goats didn’t do so well, as the climate slumped towards the Little Ice Age. They turned to trading, and one thing they had which Europe thirsted for was walrus ivory. This led to many delightful sidetracks involving walrus ivory, which of course led on to further trivia about the actual walruses the ivory came from.

(If you are interested in sculpted walrus ivory from the twelfth century, run “Lewis Chesspieces” through your search engine.)

One bit of trivia that delighted me was how the Europeans envisioned that the creature the tusks came from appeared. Many of us know the legend of the unicorn sprang from tusks of narwhales, but what sprang from the tusks of walruses?

One legend was the legend of the “morse”, which apparently slept while hanging by its tusks from cliffs. (Of course, I came across this because the Alarmist media was stating Global Warming was causing large numbers of walruses to fall from cliffs in Russia.) In any case, here is a somewhat skeptical discussion of the “morse”, as seen in the fifteenth century:

The History of 16th-Century Narcoleptic Walruses

One thing I noticed about the ancient descriptions about walruses was that they were described as meat-eaters, who might even chow down on a man. This seemed very different from the modern view, which sees them as practically vegan in their tastes. But I knew they did eat clams, and clams are meat. So, I decided to dig deeper. Did, perchance, they dine on other meats? A crab, perhaps? Or a lobster?

That was when my sidetracking got a bit of a surprise. I discovered certain walruses will eat seals. After all, a walrus weighs two tons, and a small seal is only a hundred pounds. It is easy to see who would win that battle. However, did they only scavenge dead seals, when at the point of starvation? Or did they go out of their way to hunt living seals? And here I got another surprise. Some of the biggest male walruses, with the broadest shoulders, seem to say “to hell with clams”, and prefer seals.

Of course, my skeptical side rears his head, but here is a summary of a paper by two scientists, published back in 1984:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00265562?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&CJEVENT=31ff61fa68f611ec829605b20a82b832&utm_campaign=3_nsn6445_brand_PID100357191&utm_content=de_textlink&?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_term=PID100357191

One sentence from the article intreagued me. It was this:

“Our findings from the stomachs indicated that seal eating was 10 to 100 times more common during the 1970’s and early 1980’s (0.6–3.0%, N=645) than it had been in the previous three decades (0.07–0.20%, N=4015).”

This may demonstrate how far trivia leads me afield, and you may ask, “What does that have to do with sea-ice?

The answer is that sea-ice expanded to a high point in 1979. The media was producing sensationist articles about a “Coming Ice Age”, rather than “Global Warming.” And the expansion of sea-ice meant there was less open water for walrus to hunt clams in. It also meant that seals and walrus were crowded together. So what was a poor walrus to do?

Now we come to the crux of the matter. Could a walrus mistake a human for a seal, and attempt to chow down on a man? And, because walrus were equally stressed back when the Medieval Warm Period’s open waters were giving way to the Little Ice Age’s thick ice, (ice which led to Iceland being icebound and ice fairs on the Thames in London), could not the poor walruses become so ferocious that they resembled the “morse” of lore?

Sadly, I couldn’t find a single example of a man-eating walrus on the web. And if you can’t even find it on the web, where you can find many unlikely things, then it likely isn’t worth thinking further about. So I stopped looking, although, as I have explained, trivia has an odd habit of persisting and lurking about in the dimmer recesses of my mind. But I gave it no further thought, until……TODAY!!!

Today I was just lurking around during my spare time (which I have too little of) looking for sanity on sea-ice sites (which there is also too little of) and I visited the zoologist Susan Crawford’s “Polar Bear Science”, to see what the polar bears were up to. It just so happened that she recommended an old video from 1986, “back when science hadn’t become so political.” I thought that might be a refreshing change and sat back to watch.

This video, called “Edge Of Ice” by William Hansen, is about the wildlife of Lancaster Sound, well north of Hudson Bay. Like many nature-documentaries it includes long spells of music where the narrator seems to have fallen asleep, but I didn’t mind because I happen to like views of sea-ice, especially underwater views. But what was especially unique was that it was not merely the narrator talking (where often one feels the narrator has never visited the arctic) but it also included the voice of an actual Inuit, describing how he hunted on the edge of the ice. And this Inuit, in a most offhand manner, casually mentions that one needs to be wary of walrus, for they can eat a man. It is amazing how casual it is; the music doesn’t even pause or become more dramatic; it is as casual as it would have been if he stated “Water freezes when it gets cold.”

If you want to see it for yourself, watch the wonderful video. (Hint: it is towards the end of the first half; and the video is 55 minutes long.)

https://www.nfb.ca/film/edge_of_ice/

To conclude, yes, it may be possible Walruses indeed do eat people. Not that I say this with any scientific certainty, but I say it in my mischievous manner, hoping to stimulate discussion. Science is all about discussion, as imagination wages its ceaseless battle with reality. Is such a thing possible? Well, let’s talk about it. Why not? Why censor?

I likely should end with a disclaimer, just in case any walruses are reading this. I am not saying that walruses want to eat us. After all, Great White Sharks don’t want to eat us; it just so happens that a surfer in a black wet suit resembles the seals the Great White Shark wants; apparently we don’t taste all that good, and the shark swiftly spits us out, but alas, by then it is too late. The damage has been done. And perhaps the same is true for walruses. Further research is needed. Please send funding.

COVID DOCTORS CENSORED

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have all censored these doctors exposing Covid Virus misinformation, stating it is the doctors who are misinformed. Since when do non-doctors have the right to repress the medical opinions of doctors? And even doctors say patients have the right to get a “second opinion.”

This censorship has gotten way out of hand. Hopefully we find our way around it by using smaller websites, such as the one below which still has the doctor’s censored press conference. (I hope the site keeps working).

https://lbry.tv/@GeekforTruth:c/American-Doctors-Address-COVID-19-Misinformation:4

THE PUSHBACK: Fragrance of Roses or Flagrance of Bozos

The so-called “Swamp” has a horror of being drained. Not merely will a draining result in the loss of the perks of power, but it also will involve the exposure of abuse of power.

Formerly such exposure was hidden by hypocrisy. Politicians kept their cheeks as smoothly shaved as choirboys, thinking naive people would think they were innocent. They liked to portray their “resistance” as if it was a noble thing, with a capital “R”: “The Resistance”.

However the persistent erosions of Truth made their hypocrisy more and more obvious, which made them more desperate, until now the resistance definitely has no capital “R”. No payments of blackmail to the picture-taking owners of Pleasure Islands can hide the whoring, and killing the whore-masters only makes the evil greater.

I have worked many jobs in my time that made me reek, although the stink was superficial, and deep down I was a hard-working fellow. For example, next time you open a can of sardines, pause to think how the people who worked at the cannery smelled. There was no deodorant that could hide the smell of fish, once it got into the fabric of your jeans or soaked into your hair. Ten washings wouldn’t work; you had to get new jeans or a haircut, to stop people giving you disapproving looks when you stepped into a shop for a slice of pizza.

Therefore I thought things might be different when I worked in a herbs and spices warehouse where my job included filling tiny quarter-ounce bottles with essential oils. Especially popular was the oil of roses, and when I stepped into the shop to grab a slice of pizza after filling several hundred hundred small bottles with rose oil I did not expect disapproval. What I heard was, “Peee-yoooo! You smell like a French whorehouse!”

Apparently people are not fooled by superficial scents. A man may associate perfume with a certain woman, but he hopefully looks deeper than her skin or her scent. When people look deeper they tend to see your hypocrisy, at which point a person can either be humble and confess their shortcoming, or become increasingly desperate in their attempts to preserve their privileged position among the so-called “elite”, though they are increasingly called “snakes of the Swamp.”

We are increasingly seeing “the resistance” resorting to desperate measures. It is not merely Harvey Weinstein and Jeffry Epstein whose sleaze is being exposed. The bribes handed out to Hunter Biden by Ukraine and China, and the falsified warrants sought by the FBI, and the twisted science employed to frighten people with Global Warming or the Corona Virus, are exposed, and the sycophants in the Mainstream Media only make the obvious more obvious when they attempt to hide the obvious, while also exposing themselves as complicit in the shams. What began as a pebble is becoming an avalanche.

More and more people are becoming fed up. Every action has a reaction, and “the resistance” is creating “The Pushback”.

The media does not want to show it, but here is an example:

And here is another:

The “Push-back” is not reported, and apparently there are efforts to censor it from Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, but such efforts are merely the Swamp growing increasingly desperate. Hypocrisy is dependent on hiding the truth, whereas honesty admits our blunders and displays a willingness to “stand corrected”. In fact most religious discipline is not a matter of pretending one is perfect, but rather a matter of looking towards Perfection and being led towards that Truth, while confessing imperfection. To pretend one has no problems is a problem in and of itself.

To tear down statues because the past isn’t perfect is a way of hiding from imperfection. It is better to see the imperfection in our founding fathers, and to study how they strove towards perfection even while confessing they themselves were imperfect. In the words of Saint John, “If we say we have no sin, then the Truth is not in us.”

Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. We must bravely face even that we wish forgotten.

(In actual fact the above photo wasn’t taken at the Democrat Convention in 1924; I Duckduckgoed “Klanbake”…..[I never use the word “Google” anymore, unless I have to.] It turns out there is quite a battle going on in the internet, with Republicans trying to to tar the Democrats as racists, and Democrats defensively pointing out Republicans were also members of the KKK. At both 1924 conventions motions were put forward to condemn the KKK, and neither party would vote to do so. In the Democrat convention “a platform plank favored by Smith supporters that would have condemned the Klan by name went down to defeat after a raucous debate that degenerated into fisticuffs”. Democracy in action is not always pretty.)

If you want the real scent of roses you have to bear the thorns.

LOCAL VIEW –Dust Versus Crust–

Robert Frost wrote a poem I often recite in the winter woods, as it is short and easy to remember:

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I rued.

This poem seems to typify the way a northern mind grasps at straws of beauty, in order to survive the general state of depression that deepens as the long northern winter goes on and on and on (and on.)

After Christmas, what holiday is there? New Years? What is that? Is turning a page on the calendar really worth rejoicing about? And the birthdays of defunct people, who had far more dignity than modern politicians, tends to depress me more than they inspire me, for I am reminded how dark our days are. And finally, you have to admit “Ground Hog’s Day” seems downright desperate, in terms of holidays.

Eventually we have to become self reliant, and display the sort of guts Robert Frost displayed, finding the beauty he shared in his poem. It was a dark day, a day he “rued”, yet he found something bright, not only for himself, but for me, (for he shared it with me [and countless others] though he never knew me).

It is nice to be able to share, but apparently some at Google do not think certain individuals, such as myself, should be sharing. If they feel a certain view is politically incorrect, (such as my view that arctic sea-ice is not going to be melted away by 2013 as promised, because it hasn’t), then they will seek to prevent people from sharing their views by artificially reducing the possibility their posts will be seen on Google’s search engine.  Power corrupts, and Google has apparently sunk to the level of a third world dictatorship, by virtually “disappearing” political opponents.

To be honest, I prefer being virtually “disappeared” to the reality version, for in many ways being unknown and unseen is everyday, for artists. Even Robert Frost went years without being well known, and many artists are simply not born for fame. Great singers have remained the cherished property of a small church choir their entire lives, radiating their beauty to a select few, making a poor congregation wealthy even as the world never knows what it is missing. This actually happens more often than not; the greatest comics perform before a crowd of eight at a backwater bar, as the wealthy go impoverished.

Despite obvious shortcomings, wealth and power tricks and fools people, and therefore those at Google deem it wise to stifle Freedom of Speech, and consequently live in a sort of self-created deafness. At best perhaps some think that, like members of Boston’s old, Puritan “Watch and Ward” society, they protect the innocent from some sort of “porn”, (by studying a great deal of it themselves). But the poor are neither as innocent nor naive as some suspect, and the soap that cleans a slum is not made by calling slums illegal, nor by making talk about back alleys be whispers.

In any case, where bringing up a topic such as “arctic sea-ice” once was a way to generate “hits” at a website, now it generates dead silence.

I find this a bit winter-like, and depressing. To share, and generate a will to censor rather than reciprocal sharing, is like being warm and catchinga cold blast from the north. It seems the upper crust is attempting to forbid sharing, in a sense denying the dust that delights, and leaving only a day “rued”.

The snow is glued to the swaying forest
And the northern blasts can’t shake any loose.
There seems no subtlety to this contest.
There is something solid in the crunch of boots
Across a frozen scene, something as starched
As the hairstyles of evening newscasters.
Where is the dust of snow falling from arched
Hemlocks, jostled by crows, that old masters
Wrote poems about? Is it too delicate
And too precious for times given to louts?
No, for the crunch of boots pontificate
Of a glue that was wet, before “Ins” became “Outs”.
Warm wet winds during the night, as I sleep,
Makes all trees birches, with oaths they must keep.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against sitting in a warm penthouse sipping brandy. I’d do it myself, if invited. Nor do I have anything against an above-it-all attitude. (Brandy has that effect.) It is just that feeling above it all can result in one looking down their nose and becoming haughty, and sneering that others are mere children, mere dogs.

Be that way, if you must. The children and dog will not mind, as long as you leave them alone to play. The dog will play keep-away with a stick, delighting in the attention of ten kids running after it.

Do you know what I think? I think those who scorn children and dogs are strangely threatened by the fact children and dogs have no real interest in money or fame, and would rather play in the snow than perch in a penthouse. Therefore they want to butt in and make children and dogs see they are important. They demand respect. They will outlaw sharing, unless you obey their rules.

But life goes on outside Silicon Valley. Alas for the Googlites, who make a winter without warmth, even in sunny California.