More lunacy to ponder

Real life has gotten in the way of my good intentions to write blog posts lately. I took an out-of-state trip at the end of May and got sick with a sinus infection and upper respiratory infection. So, after an antibiotic I thought I was over that, but then a different infection took hold and I went through lab tests and two more rounds of two different antibiotics for that. Finally, got past that and now I’m back to having another bout of some sinus/upper respiratory mess again. I haven’t gone to my doctor yet, as I just finished the third antibiotic last weekend and hope to avoid a fourth round of antibiotics.

So, on top of feeling poorly, on the 4th of July my home AC died and it became miserable in my house quickly, despite ceiling fans and setting up several electric fans. Luckily, I have a separate AC unit for the back porch, which we installed windows in years ago, and I now usually refer to as my sunroom. My late husband liked to sit out there to smoke, so we put in heating and air a long time ago. I had that cool room, so it wasn’t any real suffering – just another inconvenience. Yesterday morning, I had to call several AC repair services to locate one that could come that day and after replacing the capacitor in the afternoon, it was fixed. By evening my house was cooled off and life returned to normal.

A few lessons learned though – I am very dependent on AC, but so are my pets. The cats were totally out of sorts and my late husband’s dog is 16 years old and he couldn’t deal with the heat in the house at all. There was no big emergency, but with feeling poorly already, not having AC was very unpleasant. I think most people in the American South are dependent on air conditioning and would struggle if there was an extended power outage. It made me think about how fragile most of society (myself included) is to even small disruptions to our modern way of life.

With my house still cooling off, I decided to try making meatloaf in my instant pot, because I didn’t want to turn the oven on in the kitchen. I’ve been trying to experiment with using my instant pot more. I used a foil loaf pan to hold the meatloaf and set it on the wire rack in my instant pot. The meatloaf was okay – not terrific and I did turn the broiler on for few minutes to get the glaze to set. Meatloaf made in the oven is better, I think, but this instant pot method did work. I made meatloaf in my slow cooker years ago and that works too. Being willing to try new things and improvise are two habits worth cultivating.

That brings me to what’s been on my mind. Trying new things and “improvising” need some guardrails and I have a problem when people try to play God. The entire transgender movement is based on playing God, trying to chemically and surgically alter biological sex, which isn’t possible. Instead, it’s focused on surgically mutilating sex organs and chemically manipulating hormones. While I don’t believe in being mean to trans people, especially children sucked up into this destructive movement, I think the movement is a social contagion spread mostly via social media. I won’t pay lip service to beliefs and actions, I don’t believe in.

Being able to say you don’t agree with something shouldn’t be controversial in America, but there’s a whole lot of mainstream media and political pressure to make people submit to left-wing cultural ideas or you’re liable to be targeted as a dreaded MAGA extremist. Unfortunately, there’s now a whole lot of get-on-board pressure among the American right -wing political/media crowd too. You either buy into their latest hot take conspiracy theories or wacky ideas that race across the internet or you’re labeled “one of THEM.” I am an American – first, last, always.

During the pandemic, this media/political pressure took the form of ostensibly working to “protect people from COVID misinformation” and came replete with the mantra “trust the science.” Before the pandemic, I had a fair amount of trust in public health efforts and especially in vaccinations, because vaccinations have led to remarkable life-saving around the globe, especially against diseases like polio and smallpox. Yet, here I was distrusting our public health officials and doubting “the science,”as more politicians and the mainstream media started demanding we must “trust the science.”

This post isn’t about rehashing the pandemic or the trans movement, it’s pondering how we evaluate new “big ideas,” that have never been tested before. No matter where you stand on COVID vaccines, it’s indisputable that the vaccines do not stop the spread nor do they protect you from contracting the disease. And in regards to all the other pandemic “social mitigation” efforts – closing businesses, churches, schools, etc. None of those efforts had any science,

So the other day I say a Politico report: White House cautiously opens the door to study blocking sun’s rays to slow global warming. We’ve been told to embrace solar power, which relies on the sun and now some scientists are suggesting tinkering with screwing up the upper atmosphere to block sunlight, per the Politico article:

“The controversial concept known as solar radiation modification is a potentially effective response to fighting climate change, but one that could have unknown side effects stemming from altering the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, some scientists say.”

The long-term damage from trying all these untested pandemic responses, is still being studied. The long-term decimation of people’s lives from getting caught up in the trans movement extremism is only beginning to trickle out with horrifying stories of young people, who were rushed into “gender-affirming” drug therapies to “block puberty” or even to surgically remove sex organs. When I first heard about “solar radiation modification,” I thought it was fake news or someone had mistakenly bought into some dystopian sci-fi plot.

I wonder how many people would support this type of science experiment, that has the potential to cause mass starvation, even more catastrophic climate change, or even trigger an ELE, an extinction level event?

Sorry, after witnessing the politicization of science, in recent years, where absurd word and semantical games get spun up to deceive the American public and manipulate people into meekly submitting to all sorts of stupid, pointless and some very destructive actions, all sold by “trust the science,” well, that trust is broken. People who play word games about defining what a woman is should not have the power to decide to screw with our atmosphere and try to control how much sunlight we’re allowed to have to survive. The hubris to think they should be allowed to try to control the sun is mind boggling.

Trust is earned. I’m a firm, “Hell, NO!” on allowing mad scientists to use the earth and humanity as test subjects.

Note: there are other news sources that reported on the Biden administration opening the door to study blocking the sun, by screwing up the upper atmosphere, so here are a few:

FOX News – White House report signals openness to manipulating sunlight to prevent climate change

CNBC – White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight

The Both Side News – To combat climate change, the White House may block sunlight