ene_thing

State elections

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:39:14 GMT

I dont know how to react to the bits of campaigning I have been seeing. Yeah for the state supreme court election result. Hilarity at the other candidate saying the position wasnt a political one during her campaign, yet her "watch party" clips were all about the political party that supported her and their hopes for other state positions in the future!
Shaking my head at the whole state and its political shifts. Part of the problem, I think, is that some people think the political parties still stand for the same things they stood for 20 or even 40 years ago, or wish they did because they agree with some, but not others, and they used to be in better alignment with the state's reality, tendencies, and local understanding of the world's contemporary reality.
Issues just starting to come up are inadequate school funding, data center politics.(The state or subsections, cities, etc. made the mistake of trying to sneak them in, with neither adequate information from the data center businesses or populace input or the least bit of environmental impact study due to the lack of information or honesty.)
This election on the wider scale was yet another yes to women's rights, more specifically prochoice on abortion. In the past, some people here have voted Republican almost solely because they were anti abortion, but as in the past, limits were immediately made too extreme. And as has usually been the case in anti abortion states, medical assistance to pregnant women and their children is pitiful to non existant. Regardless of the excuses, the practical reality is forcing women to get back alley abortions, risk their lives by going without medical care, and be pressured into putting their babies up for adoption. I am most offended when the excuse is Christian based views on the sanctity of life, because abandoning women and risking their lives in the process is not the least bit Christian.
More generally, I am increasingly disallusioned about our justice system. The current abuse and politicalization of the nations Supreme Court is just the most recent and obvious of the problems that our lax attention and stupidity has allowed to develop. Even the terms our newspeople use to describe the justices 'progressive", "conservative", "liberal" say politics at every use, all the while everyone talking about fair and unbiased....not. How many times do statistics have to show the racial bias of death sentences and other severe sentences before anyone will admit to a problem? And the utter stupidity of treating young teens with no comprehension of cause and effect or consequences as adults. Could we possibly create hardened criminals any faster than by being so cruel to children at their most impressionable age? We have learned a lot in 250 years, but in some ways, we are still stuck or going back to our roots, when the English King thought that his own loyal people in the colonies needed to be controlled by punishment and force of arms, because it never occured to him that that was the very definition of a tyrant.

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Pet Peeves - Bad Ads

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:24:58 GMT

My sister can read in front of the tv, paying attention to whichever she finds more intersting, and so ignoring ads. I usually work on crafts and listen to the tv, unfortunately including the advertizing. Those have become increasingly annoying.

If food, ie nutrition, can help my health, I will always take that option over medicine. I dont consider so-called nutritional supplements either one. Being unregulated, they often contain none of the portions of their source material (say garlic or beet) that have the real nutritional value. Plus, you can tell their costs are unjustified from the plethora of ads and the fact that they are paying more than the average consumer in order to take the source away from consumers. We have to ad sources of gelatin to our diet because butchers can get more for the bones from other buyers. Sardine oil would be a great source of omega 3 and other healthy features but it isnt in our sardines because health supplement manufactures pay more than consumers. Beets are harder to get unless you grow them yourself, and mushroom prices are up because people will pay crazy high prices for nutritional supplements rather than eating right, but who knows if nutritional supplements have any value at all? Certainly never as much as the real thing.

Some ads are edifying in their way. You know the insurance companies make a fortune off of people who get Part C medicare, because the ads are so prolific on that part even outside the open season for medicare changes. (Doesnt that mean they arent worth paying for, in most cases?) You know the ongoing education of practicing doctors must be lax or problematical, else why advertise prescription medicines to the potential patients instead of perscribers?

My pet peeve, though, is how thoroughly advertisement writers have been taught to use poor English and other techniques to obscure the truth rather than persuade shoppers through truths (however misleading and one sided).For instance multiplication. Multiplying increases the original value if the multiplier is greater than one, so how can anything be 10 times less? It can be 10 percent less, it can be a tenth of the original. Ten times less means absolutely noth unless to mean its not actually less at all. As to bad grammer, why would I think anyone who cant speak even simple English (unaccented) phrases with adequate grammer? Should I really think they know better than me? Than you?

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Quotable Me

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:09:54 GMT

My current big project is quilting my US250 50-star-block quilt, only three months latwr than I hoped to have it finished. Its made of a bunch of variations on traditional blocks, but I still consider it an art quilt. It includes rejected blocks, sloppily made blocks, barely stars, and lots of irregularities, intentionally. The USA isnt perfect. Democracy is struggling, not the first time in our short and conflicted history, and the quilt is intended to convey that.
As such, the quilting is mixed, too. And as I like to do with commemorative quilts, the quilting includes messages in the form of text. My Summer of Love 50year commemorative included hippy slogans and other things that were 50 years old, like the Carol Burnett Show, Star Trek, and the like. For this one, I decided words common in descriptions of the country (dream, from quotes about the American Dream), and gquotes from our founders, or segments thereof (e.g., John Adams, "Democracy is a constant work in progress, requiring constant vigilance to ensure its survival" appears in fragments).
I love researching quotes. We know historical figures through things they said or wrote, that give context to their actions. The words are the history", what makes history different from archeology. We all like to be remembered, however briefly, so I started thinking about what quotes I would like to be remembered for. The ones I came up with had more to do with what I was reading than anything I would ever say aloud.
I would never call anyone a moron, for example, but one of our forefathers did... But I thought, they might be worth writing and sharing, anyway. So these tidbits are what I scribbled down:
Only morons think the image of an oversized house on an acre of lawn is anything but the American headache. Yet townships and counties zone for that nightmare. It's become an ongoing disaster for families, wildlife, and the house-poor, mortgaged-for-life people who thought the pucture-perfect image was more than a facade over elongated commutes, multiple jobs, and internet-addicted kids too far from any source of nature or life.
Ok, I edited as I typed because it started to become a whole essay, too long and detailed to be quotable, and not conveying any more substance. On the same flavor, something I have said:
People sometimes stop feeding the birds during the summer, on the grounds that they can get their food from nature; they dont realize that to a bird, a lawn is the Sahara, a subdivision of lawns without feeders has nothing to live on.
(We have about two thirds of an acre and our goal is to eliminate all but about 100 square feet of lawn and a couple of grassy paths. We arent there, yet, but we have the yard most noisy with bird song and the liveliest with birds, bees, and butterflies. We dont fill the lawnmower more than twice a summer. Its great!

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Hello, Rocky Road

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:10:33 GMT

Hello and welcome to ENE Thing! Just to warn you up front, I may complain alot. Life has been that way more than usual (for me). I never notice how good I have it until it gets worse (upbeat blogs, letters, and such to the contrary.)
Lately its gotten more obviously worse. You notice how bad our medical system is when a family member gets really sick. We can probably afford a little better and the folks are on on a better insurance than my sister and I can get. (If you can, sign up for the reserves when you are young enough to get the full benefit package! When we were the right age, "girls" were discouraged from doing that all around; they werent safe from their fellow soldiers. I hope its better now). Anyway, "better" is worse than it used to be, GPs dont seem to do even what seems like it should be easy, and specialists require appointments months out, even in what used to be considered an emergency, because emergencies are more common without adequate ongoing care.

And thats just the immediate medical concerns going on in the family. It runs on the forefront, being at the stage of impacting the whole family NOW. If I let myself go, I could rant on a whole lot more that is affecting my life and not just some distant strangers, from local and personal to international. I may in future posts. But I grew up with a couple mantras about complaining "rules" as they would call them on NCIS. There's no point in complaining about things you cant control (or even influence). Dont complain unless you can offer a better alternative. More recently its been, in different contexts, if you see something, say something. Because complaining to the right person can make a difference. (Its knowing who to tell, knowing when multiple voices complaining can help (or not) that's hard.

I dont have a solution to the disaster of a medical care system we have (a few years ago I tried to ask about antioxidents in food, not using that word, though, and the doctor told me she didnt deal with herbal medicine. This time with our Mom, I am left wondering if I was lucky to have talked to a doctor at all!) The face on the video phone talked like her medines could be juggled like dice! No comprehension she was talking to real people and not a lap top or tablet) BUT, I have found some things to help keep me calm between rants.

One is church. Our folks have a good sermon speaker, although he has other faults. I thought it might make mad but his message that, as sinners, we didnt deserve to have life always go right, combined nicely with the message that if we hold onto our faith through it all, it generally works out to our ultimate benefit even here on Earth, besides heaven waiting. Altogether, it calmed me down and eased my stress til the next crisis, and was ready in mind when I needed a reminder.

The other thing was volunteering. I volunteered for several things, none of them immediately, to support the National Quilt Project and have already made a couple squares, designed a couple others for showing to people as I encourage area craft groups, schools, and whoever else I think might be interested. Its a slow project, aiming to cover National Mall in 2030. Fun fiber arts with a theme of, much needed, healing. Look up Nationalquiltproject.org. no sewing required. Fabric paint or other fiber arts welcome.

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