Offloading trouble.

In the final days leading up to the election, I heard several things that upon reflection made me think of the famous story by Ursula K. Le Guin called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The imaginative premise of the story, in brief, is that there is a city of perpetual happiness and peace called Omelas, but its happy state rests entirely on a dark secret -- that one child be held in perpetual misery and darkness. Everyone else is joyful and free, but that child must remain in a state of sheer horror or the whole thing collapses. 

What brought it to mind was that, over and over again, I would hear from citizens of this free country demanding that the government guarantee so-called positive rights -- a right to food, education, health care, housing -- rather than the negative rights of just staying out of our faces -- not interfering with speech, religion, person freedom, etc. The more I heard this, the more I got to wonder why supposed adults would expect that someone else must always be required to foot the bill for them, and in many or even most cases even to free them from the bare requirements of survival, or even the consequences of their own actions. 

For example, no authority stops someone from being irresponsible over sex. They are free to do as they like. But they also want to be free from the consequences of the behavior. Someone else must pay for the health care, the drugs, the abortion, the child care and all that entails (if they keep the baby). If not, it is unfair and shows the system is corrupt and evil. 

I've heard of no-fault divorces, no-fault insurance, and no-fault claims, but what they want are no-fault lives.

In a way, though, all of us are citizens of Omelas, in the sense that the bulk of our own citizens benefit from the work of other citizens in jobs we would never want to do. Cops, prison guards, firemen, stool sample examiners, high-rise window washers, sewer workers, nurses in Alzheimer's patient wards, teachers in bad neighborhoods, and so on. We'd rather not think about them. We worry more about the garbage than the garbagemen.  

In one way most of are and really can't help but be citizens of Omelas. That is, the reason we are free and at liberty to fight one another rather than fight other nations is because, for all its faults, we still have the finest military in the world. Most of are too old or too young or just not physically capable of going to war. Whether we like to think about it or not, our active military and our veterans have made our largely pleasant lives possible. 

They have also made us proud. They have endured and suffered, in some cases beyond most of our understanding, so that we may have a chance to be happy and free -- even free to ignore who they are and what they have given for us. 

So I want to thank our veterans on this post on this Veterans Day. They really have secured the blessings of our liberty. May God bless them and may our nation be grateful to them. 

Catching up.

Sorry I've been away from the blog. Let's get caught up, shall we? 

For those of you concerned that I was eaten by the black bear that's been hanging around -- no, it did not happen. His doctor probably warned him I was bad for his cholesterol. No new bear sightings, not since this trash can raid on October 29. Well, it was either the bear or the raccoons are getting organized. 

I was and am grateful for the results of the elections last Tuesday, although as usual New York boned up. Ludicrous nonentity Kirsten Gillibrand returns to the Senate to be Chuck Schumer's flunky. And the state assembly has pulled a fast one, getting a proposition past the voters that will open the door to all kinds of shenanigans. This is what people who did not do their homework saw on the ballot: 

Abstract of Proposal Number One, An Amendment

Amendment to Protect Against Unequal Treatment

This proposal amends Article 1, Section 11 of the New York Constitution. Section 11 now protects against unequal treatment based on race, color, creed, and religion. The proposal will amend the act to also protect against unequal treatment based on ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes, as well as reproductive healthcare and autonomy.  The amendment allows laws to prevent or undo past discrimination.

It passed because New Yorkers are dumb and don't read, and they saw nice words like protect and against unequal and autonomy said all right. Okay, well, who isn't in favor of protecting against unequal treatment, right? It was sold as a means of protecting abortion, which former gubernatorial candidate John Faso accurately explained was horse hockey in the Albany paper. 

Of course, what this will actually mean is, first off, boys will be walloping girls in girls' sports. But that's just the beginning. It also undermines parental authority, in opposition to existing state law. When the state takes a 10-year-old away from his parents because he wants to get his willie chopped off and be a girl and they don't want him to do that, maybe someone will point out to those parents that they should not have voted this way. 

It is literally the only proposition on a ballot I have ever seen that the archdiocese and every priest in it begged parishioners not to support. Oh, well. Vote in haste, cry your eyes out the rest of your life. 

But the rest of the nation did all right, and I am grateful to them. So let's move on to thanksgiving! 

Thanksgiving decorations are more of a thing this year, or so I notice around the neighborhood, and maybe that's not a coincidence. This house chimed in on a popular Thanksgiving meme:

Another house brilliantly stuck it to a blog post of mine from TEN YEARS AGO. Way back in 2014, I wrote:  

Christmas is green and red. Halloween is orange and black. St. Patrick's Day is green. First day of school is red and black (schools and blackboards). New Year's is white, black, and silver. Easter is anything, as long as it's pastel. I suppose it's only a matter of time before porch lights are available for all these holidays and more. But Thanksgiving is restricted to the colors of late fall, and by the end of November there are virtually no colors left. The leaves have fallen, been raked up, mulched, gone. Bare trees remain, and pine cones. Thanksgiving is brown. Who does brown lights?

Well, now they have those strip lights that can be turned to any color in the spectrum! And guess what? I found a house lit up in brown lights for the season! Very nice, and I applaud their effort and the desire to celebrate the great Thanksgiving holiday. 

I couldn't believe my brown light tirade ran a whole decade ago. But yeah, I've been blogging on this site for almost eleven years, and on another host prior to than for a couple more. Maybe that's enough out of me already. 

Boo who?

Around Halloween we were chatting about the UNICEF boxes, the cardboard boxes that some poor kids had to schlep around to go schnorring on behalf of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. I think I did it once. Sometimes in school they'd put the guilt screws on you, and you felt obliged to participate. Well, I figured that UNICEF boxes had gone the way of leisure suits and Pet Rocks. 

Nope.

It's back.

When I was a kid, living in the Five Boroughs, there were plenty of true believers among the parents. They had grown up under the threat of World War and nuclear holocaust, and they believed that the United Nations was an important means to bring countries together and do good throughout the world. Sure, the Communists were always on the march, and the UN reps were always fighting, but as long as the Soviets or the Chinese didn't actually declare war on the United States or Western Europe, then surely the UN was working. It was acting as a "cooling dish" to prevent hotheads from bumbling into war, and a meeting place to try to work out treaties in the presence of other nations, preventing a treaty-based honor system that would require half the world to go to war against the other half as in 1914. 

UNICEF was another helpful idea. It would show that the nations of the world could work together to help children, all children, everywhere, when disaster or famine or illness struck. The pennies, nickels, and dimes we collected along with our fun-size Krackels (yay!) and Hershey Special Darks (boo!) would help the UN perform this mission. 

I'm not sure where it really started to go wrong. Publicly wrong, anyway. It was as the Cold War was coming to a close. In 1988, the Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to the UN Peacekeeping Forces for "reducing tensions where an armistice has been negotiated but a peace treaty has yet to be established." By 1996 it had been noted that in half the nations the UN Peacekeeping Forces went, there was a "rapid rise in child prostitution".

Does anyone expect anything good out of the UN anymore? It seemed like its World Health Organization might be useful, but its reputation went in the garbage with just about every other major health organization during COVID. A genuine investigation into how the pandemic started and who started it would turn things around, but these groups would rather ride the train to hell than admit fault, rattle the Communist Chinese, or (worst of all) give the plebes any chance of vindication. All the UN is good for is condemning Israel and sometimes the United States, working with terrorists, and demanding that we beasts in the West take more rapists and murderers into our bosom (as if we don't have enough of our own). 

So no, I will never recommend anyone give to UNICEF or any other concern in which the UN is involved. I don't know how well UNICEF does what it purports to do, but the United Nations as a whole has never lived up to its promise, so why should UNICEF? There are better charities. 

The word books are here!

This doesn't matter to anyone outside the publishing industry, and only to about half of them, but The Chicago Manual of Style has coughed up an 18th edition, and made the front cover a friendly-but-eye-hurting yellow rather than their previous trademark orange.  

For those who don't know (and certainly needn't care), the manual is a big book, a list price $75 book, that standardizes everything in the book publishing process from the smallest punctuation to the largest production demands. Newspapers don't use it; they follow the Associated Press style guide. Medical publishers generally follow the AMA's style guide, I believe. I own those, too. And then there's Words Into Type, a sort of rival of CMS, but not given to as many editions. It's often used as a supplement, because there's nothing a 1,200-page cinder block of a book needs more than a supplement. 

The University of Chicago Press began dispensing publishing wisdom in 1891, as a sheet that contained the information for the publisher's compositors and pressmen, who had to deal with scruffy manuscripts from scruffy professors (or so I imagine). 

Even at such an early stage, “the University Press style book and style sheet” was considered important enough to be preserved, along with other items from the Press’s early years, in the cornerstone of the new Press building in 1903.

That sheet grew into a pamphlet, and by 1906 the pamphlet had become a book: Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended specimens of types in use—otherwise known as the 1st edition of the Manual. At 200 pages, the original Manual cost 50 cents, plus 6 cents for postage and handling.

It's the bible for most book publishers, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is for the headshrinkers, or the Pocket Pal is for graphics and reproduction guys. (You may insert your Pocket Pal joke here.) 

The CMS doesn’t change much between editions. The 17th was published in 2017. The last few have been busy keeping up with technological changes. And yet it's important to have the most recent one so that we're all quite literally on the same page. If I get into a fight with an editor or writer over the capitalization of celestial objects, I want to refer them to 8.143 (the 143rd section of chapter 8) to show that aurora borealis is set in lowercase. As you can see, the CMS plays referee.  

Despite this, I used to work at a company where the copy chief absolutely refused to use the 15th edition, demanding that we galley slaves stay with the 14th. I do not know why he had it in for the 15th, but he was not kidding. Down with the 15th! was his cry. Soon after I was laid off from that job, the 16th edition came out. I am still afraid the shock may have killed him. 

I haven't looked at the 18th much yet. I worry that they've decided to stuff it with a bunch of politically correct stuff -- how to handle newly coined pronouns, how to address someone who identifies as a wallaby, that kind of thing. It can’t be helped. At least the book remains a noble defender of the serial comma.

Now that I've whipped you into a Chicago Manual of Style frenzy, you will be glad to know that you can buy merch.

The number on the back makes me laugh. Like you play third base for the Chicago Manuals of Style. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard.