Stephanie C. Fox's Blog

Antoinette and Her Friends Resist is an illustrated story of eight dolls who fight the abortion legal hellscape of the United States to deliver reproductive healthcare to women who can’t access it.

Antoinette and Her Friends Resist is about a group of eight dolls who are friends and who are furious about the abortion legal hellscape of the United States.
These dolls are a violinist, a sitar player, a lawyer, a botanist, an art curator, a gynecologist, a veterinary marine biologist, and an accountant.
Antoinette returns for another story in which the dolls enjoy gourmet food – which means cooking and baking it as well as eating it – travel, art, music, and visits with each other.
The story will inspire the reader to want to do what the dolls do: enjoy life to the fullest and resist restraints on women’s lives.
The dolls’ story of resistance focuses on the attack in the United States on reproductive rights. They are determined to get reproductive healthcare to women all over the United States, starting from pro-choice states and delivering it to forced birther states, and they are well-prepared to do it.
All this is done covertly, because the dolls have no intention of being caught and stopped.
Fascists will want to ban this book. The story is my own creation, developed while observing the abortion legal hellscape that the United States has been forced into with the fall of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Women are dying and having to navigate an Orwellian surveillance network to access reproductive healthcare, and this book illustrates the unreasonableness that is imposed on their lives with fictitious situations. It covers relevant points of abortion and reproductive law, the logistics involved in accessing pills in forced birther states, and provides links in the references for real-life help with this.The dolls were all created by me: faces, ears, and manicures embroidered by hand, wigs chosen and sewn on, and their names written in Chancery Italic calligraphy with a fine-point Sharpie pen on their left ankles. Plus, “QueenBeeDoll” on their left butt cheeks! I designed and sewed all of their many outfits, photographed them, and then drew on my collection of other photographs, plus some from Wikimedia Commons, for background images. The dolls were then inserted into those venues using Photoshop.The story details points of law, logistics of reproductive health care, logistics of coping with the surveillance infrastructure in forced birther states, and shows a story of resistance against that. The theme is that slavery laws did not deserve respect or obedience, therefore neither do laws that get women killed and/or ruin women’s health.The book also covers art, history, herstory, music, and gourmet experiences, complete with travel (some of which has been impacted by current U.S. policies).That part will make the reader want to enjoy some of those things (not the last bit – but it’s another important thing to learn about).I love to make my readers think, “I want to experience that, too!”The book is also full of art: I used Photoshop to put the dolls that I embroidered and outfitted against many different backgrounds, and…I made my witches, a lawyer and a gynecologist, fly! It was even more fun than the previous time that I did this.Here is a preview:Here are the sales venues for the book, which is available in paperback and as an ebook, plus a QR code:Kindle | Amazon Print | Nook | Barnes & Noble | IngramSpark – Print | Kobo | Google Books 

 

The post Antoinette and Her Friends Resist – Published! appeared first on QueenBeeEdit | QueenBeeBooks.

We have overshot our planet’s ecological budget as of the 24th of July, 2025.

Every resource we use for the rest of the year is now borrowed from the future on a non-negotiable budget.

At least, that’s the theory. We have been borrowing like this since the year I was born – 1969 – so I don’t really believe that.

I think the situation is likely much worse after all those decades of borrowing.

Each nation has its own overshoot date, and it changes each year.

The one for my country, the United States, was on March 13th.

Looking at these dates, I notice which countries are desert nations: Qatar, Kuwait, Mongolia.

And which ones are city-states, such as Singapore. That’s a wealthy nation, with a high standard of living.

European nations have early dates.

I see a nation and think about what its location, climate, and population density is and consider how its date was assigned.

It’s something to think about.

Earth Overshoot Day, with some exceptions, has mostly gotten earlier and earlier each year over time.

One exception was 2020, the year of the pandemic. It didn’t move much, but you can see it fell later…and then went right back to getting earlier the next year, continuing that trend. Humans travel a lot, so of course this happened.

It feels as though few people care or are willing to do anything about this.

When birth rates fall, it is not out of a sense of concern about this for most.

I say most because obviously, some people care and research this, or I wouldn’t have found any data to refer to about it.

But when I listen to and watch and read the news and hear of falling birth rates anywhere, it seems to be more about an unwillingness to fall into poverty as a result of having kids, and an unwillingness to inflict the consequences of our national disgrace, a fascist regime perpetrated by Agenda 2025, the Heritage Foundation, Herr Pumpkingropenfuhrer (a moniker I coined back in 2016), and the rest of the misogynists in that gang.

We are living with an idiocracy comprised of a gang of selfish males who prefer to skew data to their purposes rather than work with the truth, and their purposes are ruining every facet of our society.

This is a revenge presidency for the orange moron, who continues to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. His father malingered for years with that, so I’m not optimistic that he will die and rid of us himself as a result of it any time soon.

This fiend cannot abide the slightest criticism.

He shows this by calling any news report that he doesn’t like – and there are so many of them – “fake”.

He shows this by demanding that AI algorithms be rewritten to include his administration’s worldview or else lose access to federal contracts.

He shows this by de-funding education and public television and broadcasting.

He shows this by demanding the cancellation of the most highly rated of late-night comedians’ shows, that of Stephen Colbert.

Colbert will be fine, of course. He has a net worth of tens of millions of dollars and is highly respected and admired for his in-depth social and political comedy. He will appear elsewhere soon. It’s the rest of us who lose out; CBS, NBC, and ABC are the 3 original broadcasters that don’t require fees to access them. The cancellation of Colbert’s show is an assault on freedom of speech, expression, and democracy.

I know who else does this: the Islamic Republic of Iran, and other police states, such as Russia.

“You are insulting Islam!” shriek the cleric at the slightest criticism.

The orange fiend demonstrates that he wants a poorly educated population that is ill-equipped to think critically.

He wants us poor and hungry as he cancels food and medical aid, and deletes the U.S. A.I.D. program.

Meanwhile, women are the targets of lots of this nonsense, with lethal and deleterious effects.

He and his gang are doing their best to take away abortion and reproductive care access, including birth control, and he is ordering the destruction of birth control supplies that were to be distributed to women in developing nations, supplies that cost millions to produce.

Forced births will lead to unwanted babies, increasing the human population and forcing women to devote time and resources that they either cannot or do not wish to devote to raising them. This makes little sense. The unwanted children will not be happy, and neither will the unwilling mothers. It puts everyone at a disadvantage.

Women cannot wait until the law is reset to prioritize their bodily autonomy.

Anti-choice legislation and policies in forced birther states are ruining women’s health, and getting women killed.

There is no reason to respect such laws, any more than abolitionists viewed slavery. It’s an applicable analogy, and needs to be pointed out.

Full faith and credit to laws of other states can go both ways, too.

Some states are making laws that demand to know where their female citizens went and when, and all about their health records…and the identities and actions of the physicians in other states – states with laws that prioritize women’s bodily autonomy and leave medical decisions up to women and their doctors.

Other states are making laws that deny them that data, and protect the women patients who come to their physicians for help.

They also refuse to enforce out-of-state judgments and fines levied against their physicians for helping out-of-state women who need abortion and reproductive health care.

All this is a refusal to respect forced birther legislation, and the harassment and controlling behavior of misogynists.

Yes, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) wasn’t perfect, but having a national law was definitely the way to go because it protected women by prioritizing women over a lump of microscopic cells, over a fetus that was either unwanted or had genetic problems, and against abusive men. Having a gap of time in which women are left unprotected and unable to control their reproductive systems is lethal and unreasonable.

Secrecy and privacy are human rights, and women are human beings.

Women who are unwilling to be pregnant in forced birther states are relocating to abortion rights states. It’s just safer for their health to be pregnant and give birth there.

But that takes money and job opportunities. There are many women who cannot afford to move. They are trapped.

Women are being arrested for having miscarriages, for how they dispose of bodily tissue and fetuses from those miscarriages, and denied care when they need abortions in order to remain healthy.

Some states are withholding prenatal and preventive care based on physicians’ personal religious views and prejudices, Hippocratic Oath be damned.

Other refuse to authorize medical scans that might reveal ectopic pregnancies. Those are the ones that occur in Fallopian tubes rather than in a uterus. Ectopic pregnancies are typically lethal, and treated with a salpingectomy, i.e. removal of the affected Fallopian tube. But that can only happen if it is detected in time.

I voted for Kamala Harris. I voted for competent and compassionate leadership, not this.

Herr Pumpkingropenfuhrer is destroying democracy, the rule of law, and everything that is good about America.

That is why my next book will deal with all of these issues.

I have published a book about this when we had leadership that cared about the people.

Antoinette: A Year in the Life of a Doll with Her Friends is available at:

https://www.amazon.com/Antoinette-Year-Life-Doll-Friends/dp/1734374322/

That was last year, when life was much saner.

Such books do not induce outrage and upset like the ones that deal with outrages upon people and society, but now that we are living with that situation, the next one is likely to do that. With any luck, it will anger the fiends enough to get on a banned books list.

I now have 8 dolls. The draft contains a lot of dialogue, and will of course include lots of photographs of the dolls in various scenes.

The title shall be Antoinette and Her Friends Resist.

Antoinette has had a makeover of her cosmetics (embroidery has plenty of options for that!), as have Lilith and Ileandra.

Our concert violist-opera singer, our lawyer-witch, and our alien botanist will return with new friends and plans and plots.

Antoinette will, of course, be joining other so-called “woke” artists in boycotting the Kennedy Center for the foreseeable future.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading this, and wish me luck infuriating fascists with this project!

 

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Do enough voters in the United States have the sense to both go out and vote AND vote for democracy over fascism?

That is the question that is inducing anxiety throughout this election season.

It overlaps with Hallowe’en, so Connecticut’s political historian and installation artist, Professor Matt Warshauer of West Hartford, has dedicated his exhibit to this question.

Here is the professor in a selfie he e-mailed to me during the pandemic, proudly wearing a mask that I put in his mailbox:

The display includes a Lady Liberty Kamala and a pair of skeletal politicians: AOC (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) and MTG (Marjorie Taylor Green).

It includes a note about childless cat ladies, accompanied by a pair of black cats. I have two real live black cats. That’s Ms. Chief Cherie on the left, and the Phantom Menace on the right.

And it has dog and cat skeletons in a nod to Trump’s dementia-fueled racist nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs.

It will be his last, ending a 21-season tradition of fun and public participation on his message board.

If you would like to read the history of his exhibits, you can see it at www.themindfulprofessor.com and look at his collection of photographs of them.

I went there this past weekend with my camera and photographed it, and added my comments with the Sharpie pens that he provided.

Actually, the message board was full, so I wrote on the edge of the next panel (I could see that other had also done so). Here is the entire panel:

People are going to miss visiting the professor’s political Hallowe’en exhibits. Every visitor I met at the professor’s front yard had said so.

 

I’m going to miss it.

I just hope we don’t end up missing democracy when it’s over.

Project 2025 is a dystopian nightmare scenario that belongs strictly in the pages of a novel, not in a binder full of plans for life after the next U.S. president is inaugurated.

If it is allowed to go into effect, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and lots of other novels won’t be mere fiction. They will become reality.

   

I’m sick of the apprehension already.

The choice between the candidates on offer is so obviously clear as to feel like a moot point, and yet we have to worry that the Orange Moron, Herr Pumpkingropenfuhrer (a moniker I coined 8 years ago and haven’t needed to use for quite a white!), Donald J. Trump the treasonous fraudster with a galloping case of unannounced Alzheimer’s disease mixed with innate selfishness and fascism, might actually get back into the Oval Office.

He cannot be trusted with ANYTHING. Not with our nuclear codes. Not with our nation’s secrets. NOTHING. He has already demonstrated this by leaving boxes of secret documents all over Mar-a-Largo. Our spies have been going missing around the planet.

He is a convicted rapist and fraudster.

He isn’t actually wealthy.

He crashes every business venture he engages in.

He listens to anyone who says whatever he wants to hear rather than seeking verified and reliable information with which to make decisions.

If you have the chance to watch it, see Rachel Maddow’s documentary, From Russia With Lev. It’s about a Ukranian-American man named Lev Parnas. He lied about Hunter Biden to Trump. He made up the entire story about crimes allegedly committed by Hunter Biden, ruined Hunter’s life, and is now sorry he did it. In the documentary, he finds Hunter, tells him what he did, and apologizes. And what does Hunter do? He accepts the apology.

Trump lies with every sentence that comes out of his mouth.

And he is losing his memory.

What will he blurt as this continues? He has already seen lots of classified documents.

The last thing we need is for him to have access to any more of them.

Okay…so he is obviously not the one we want.

A business person is never the one we want. Having a background and education in business puts that at the forefront of a politician’s mind, and leads to the prioritization of business interests over all else: the environment, climate change, women’s reproductive rights, health care for all, education, and on and on and on.

What we need is someone with a law degree and a background in history, politics, and government, and mostly importantly, the will to do whatever they can to help the people.

The people are all of the citizens of this nation, not just the ones with enough money to buy themselves a politician.

Elon Musk is a disgrace. He’s also a disgrace to autistic people. I am absolutely disgusted to have to count him as one of us. He is wrong about human overpopulation, he disregards the health of the ecosystem when his Space X rockets are launched, and he has ruined Twitter.

What we need is for Kamala Harris to win the 2024 election and become the next President of the United States. She is an attorney, a former prosecutor, and a good person. She is a beloved wife and stepmother, too.

But here is where the spookiness of the Hallowe’en election season creeps in: there are far too many voters out there who don’t appreciate her qualifications. They refuse to get past their own misogyny, racism, and ethnocentrism to vote her into office. Every time the election is discussed, I hear outraged and confused comments from people who value democracy, wondering how anyone could vote for such a horrible individual, a criminal who committed treason and wrecked our Supreme Court.

Kamala is female, she is Black, she is Indian, we haven’t had a woman president before, and I really want one! She is just right for the job. But will I just end up angry at the Electoral College and half the country when the vote counts are all in, as I was when Hillary didn’t get the job?!

Doug Emhoff would be the nation’s 1st First Gentleman. He is okay with it, so why should anyone else not be?! He’s secure with himself; he’s an entertainment attorney turned law professor. He has no reason to feel inadequate. He even talked about doing his best to be supportive of his wife as she works on matters of state, not making a fuss about minutia, while a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

I am a child-free cat lady. I have a law degree. I am an author of many books, the most recent of which is about a group of dolls that I made: Antoinette: A Year in the Life of a Doll with her Friends. The dolls are active in politics, law, history, herstory, science, art, music, and environmental and climate issues.

 

The book is available in paperback at: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?8E0uQvirRCEujr0zUKbJOOhc4atgBoptG2eqGnyZ7dl

I can tell you that it is not necessary to actually have the same set of life conditions (children, for the most talked about factor!) as others to be able to appreciate their importance. All votes count the same, and we all matter.

That is the equality that our democracy strives for.

It should keep improving, not suddenly regress and devolve into a nation like 1930s Germany, with collective human memory failing to appreciate how horrific that was for everyone who lived in, including the Germans. One wrong step, and the all-powerful “they” could come for anyone.

Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, the monster attorney who assisted Senator Joseph McCarthy, the anti-communist persecutor of the 1950s. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn

McCarthy and Cohn’s efforts had a chilling effect on creativity, careers of all kinds. Some memorable examples include State Department worker Paul Child (husband to chef Julia Child), and Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

I will be voting for Kamala Harris on November 5th, 2024.

When I do that, I will be wearing a shirt that I made, and bringing some of my dolls to the polls to show to Wendy, the lady who hands out those cool “I Voted” stickers (at her request). The dolls and I will be wearing our Grab ‘Em by the Ballot outfits.

I hope you will be voting for Kamala too, because the future of our nation and our democracy depends upon it.

The post A Spooky Political Hallowe’en as Our Votes Challenge a Duel of Democracy v. Fascism appeared first on QueenBeeEdit | QueenBeeBooks.

It’s Earth Overshoot Day again: August 2, 2024.

Today marks the day of this year on which we humans have used up all of the resources that our planet can replenish in the space of one year.

That means that we are operating at a deficit for the rest of this year. Good job, humans!

Actually, for developed nations, it’s worse; each nation has its own Overshoot Day, and the United States had its Overshoot Day on March 14th. Happy Belated Pi Day…

 

 

The Global Footprint Network does a fantastic job of creating these graphics. Here’s another one:

Isn’t that awful?! We are living as if we had 5 Earths, even though we only have one.

All this nonsense about technology saving us is just that: nonsense!

The planet is finite and shall remain so. Relocating to Mars is not a realistic option. It has little water, and the radiation on the planet’s surface is such that humans would have to live underground. I see health problems galore, problems which will be untreatable so far away from Earth. Plus, travel to Mars is only on an every-2-years basis, due to the lineup of planets. We don’t have warp drive yet! The scientists who work with the Large Hadron Collider will say that, too, but it much greater detail.

Anyone who has seen my previous blog posts and read my books knows that the next topic I will link the problem of overshoot to is human overpopulation.

I included Earth Overshoot Day in my latest book, Antoinette: A Year in the Life of a Doll with Her Friends.

It’s a book for for adults about 3 dolls. It is full of photographs of Antoinette, a concert violinist and soprano opera singer, Lilith, a lawyer, politician and witch, and Ileandra, an alien botanist. The dolls are shown in a wide variety of locations, wearing the outfits created for them by the author. Their activities and travels lead the reader on a tour of history, art, music, science, law, and politics while giving the reader-viewer a feast of beautiful images.

The book is an illustrated story of three dolls as they work to educate the world about issues that matter.

The dolls share their thoughts on the state of human society and the planet Earth, with the alien sharing the wisdom of her people and planet’s experiences.

The story explores law and politics in society, overpopulation, ecosystems collapse, environmentalism and sustainability, and outer space law.

The illustrations have been created by the author using her own local and travel photographs as backgrounds, with images of her dolls overlaid on them. The dolls were all made by the author. She embroidered their faces, ears, earrings, and manicures with mouliné floss embroidery threads, and sewed wigs onto their heads. She created each outfit shown on the dolls, and photographed them.

Get the book and enjoy it! You can find it at:

Kindle | Amazon Print | Nook | IngramSpark – Print | Kobo | Smashwords | Google Books 

Here is a teaser image from the book’s pages about Earth Overshoot Day:

There is another image, but I’ll leave that out here. One is enough for a blog post.

The more people who need and want to use finite resources, the worse the ecosystem fares. Eventually, it won’t provide all that we demand of it.

We are starting to see the effects of this in climate change, with this summer being the hottest ever recorded on Earth.

What is our current population? You can visit the Worldometers website for that at: https://www.worldometers.info

Here is a screenshot that I just took of that data, but it won’t be the same when you visit that site; it will have increased.

We have lots of problems to deal with, too:

Plastic pollution, fossil fuel use and depletion, the limit of the benefit of genetic manipulation to increase crop production, fascism…

The Heritage Foundation, established in 1973, wants to turn back the calendar to the 1950s, with a dash of 1873 thrown in for good measure.

What am I referring to? Project 2025, and attacks on abortion access (the Comstock Act of 1873, which outlawed abortion, must be officially repealed to fix this).

You can read all about it at this link, where you will find a free PDF of the 900-page plan for destroying democracy and establishing an authoritarian government worthy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

That is not a compliment to Project 2025. It’s a dystopian nightmare of a slam at it.

When I wrote and published Nae-Née, I joined the litany of dystopian nightmare authors with my own trilogy on human overpopulation and ecosystems collapse. In it, the Farmers are the villains. In reality, they are the scions of The Heritage Foundation, and people like them.

You can buy the novels at: Nae-Née Trilogy

Here is a quote by the father of science fiction about overpopulation:

No wonder we are seeing the rise of fascism in various places around the planet; we are overpopulated, and people are anxious about the future. Humans tend to behave badly then they get worried about having enough resources for a comfortable and happy life, and when they feel a loss of hope about being able to access them.

Here is a quote that won’t please J.D. Vance, J.D.:

J.D. Vance wants to take away birth control and abortion rights.

He’s a self-professed hillbilly.

Hillbillies, when they look outside of their geographic area and culture, are often ill at ease with the differences that they see: economic differences and the culture that comes with access to more resources is the biggest trigger of an inferiority complex.

Vance has it bad. He is living as a reaction to it.

The rest of Americans should not have to have his view of the world forced upon us in order for him to feel better about that.

The same can be said of the rest of any other people wherever fascism is rising.

It’s unfortunate that he lacks the self-confidence to live a happy life after all that has gone well for him despite his hillbilly background and the disadvantages that he feels from it.

That should be his problem, not the entire nation’s, but it is a symptom of larger problems: overpopulation, resource scarcity, and big billionaires with Nazi nannies buying politicians for decades on end.

See my reading list page for details on all that.

The main point is that people who feel insecure about themselves take it out on others. In this case, we see men seeking to control women.

We women should not have be bothered with any effects of that insecurity! We will not accept a loss of the rights we have lived with the benefits of.

As it is, I am old enough to remember a time when pollution was not yet regulated. The Connecticut River in northern Connecticut stank of the runoff from a paper mill when I was a little kid. Car exhaust was more noxious than it is now. The American diet was a lot fattier and included significantly more meat and less fresh fruits and vegetables than it does now. Food had changed a lot. But the production of it and the expansion of that production is wreaking havoc on the ecosystem.

I was 2 years old when the first Earth Overshoot Day was observed. It fell on my birthday, December 25th. (Yes, I know what day that is. I like knowing I’ll have it off!)

In little more than half a century, this date has moved back by almost 5 months. That’s a horrific change.

You can find a list of them all at: Past Earth Overshoot Days

Here is a graphic from that page:

Things aren’t getting any better, but we still have lots of competent, good people with backgrounds in law, political science, history, and economics and experience in law and politics.

People with backgrounds in business are the wrong people to occupy political offices. They tend to be selfish about sharing the world, and ignorant of the the disciplines above.

I want someone for president of the United States with a law degree and political experience, and without an inferiority complex or an anger management problem.

So, I just have one more thing to say: Win, Kamala! You are qualified, decent, and the world needs you to be our next POTUS!

The post Earth Overshoot Day and Project 2025: The Heritage Foundation Will Make It Even Earlier! appeared first on QueenBeeEdit | QueenBeeBooks.

Professor Matt Warshauer – the Mindful Professor who teaches history at Central Connecticut State University – has put up his annual political Hallowe’en display, and as usual, it does not disappoint.

This is his website, for anyone who wants to see every display he has ever created: https://themindfulprofessor.org/

Professor Warshauer has made a merry-go-round about fascism this time.

The entrance to his walkway has a welcoming arch, decorated with our unfavorite Orange MAGA Moron, that is an ode to the devolution of the Republican Party into the Repugnican Party, along with the warning: “If you elect a CLOWN, expect a CIRCUS.”

The deep emotional insecurity that Donald Trump represents and cultivates so assiduously is what has brought us back to the brink of fascism. It happens over and over, everywhere on the planet, as the cycle of human memory moves several decades away from each previous manifestation of it. The problem is that the monstrous damage done by fascism recedes from collective recollection, the remedies and safeguards against it get loosened over the decades, the legal, economic, and political climates of our lives deteriorate.

This is how we wound up with other terrible chapters in U.S. history: the Dred Scott decision (See: Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)), the Civil War, the war on women’s reproductive rights, McCarthyism, the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten for exercising their freedom of expression as writers, the ongoing fight to rein in rampant, criminal behavior with guns, a U.S. Supreme Court that has been bought and paid for by gazillionaire libertarians who have bought and paid for the politicians who confirmed the justices on it (urged on by expensive lobbyists who work out of offices on K Street in Washington, D.C.), and the attack on what Senator Amy Klobuchar calls “our temple of democracy” – the U.S. Capitol.

When I watch our politicians, I like to look up their backgrounds: education, degrees earned, previous careers, political views, and any other life experiences that help me to understand who we are dealing with.

Do they have law degrees? Not all, but I like to see that. At least they understand the laws that they have sworn to uphold.

When they veer into fascism anyway, the treason they align with and commit just seems even more heinous.

Did they study history, political science, or public policy in college/university? That always looks encouraging.

What if they studied religion, business, or sports management? Not so great.

Why not?

We are supposed to have a firewall between religion and the state.

Business and politics don’t mix; in fact, business takes advantage of politics to take more for the wealthy every chance it gets. Just look at the damage done by the economic meltdown of 2008 when the banksters got away with causing the Great Recession, and the rest of the country had to foot the bill. I wrote about that in The Book of Thieves.

Sports? We have an ex-football coach, Senator Tommy Tuberville, holding up all military promotions requiring Senate approval in protest of abortion policies that enable U.S. servicewoman to control their own fertility.

Back to the Mindful Professor’s Hallowe’en display…

There is also the usual poster-board for visitors to write on, with magic markers provided.

Here is what I wrote – a short version of the quote that appears with the post for this blog, Controversies:

There wasn’t room for the entire quote because so many people have already pretty much filled up the board, but here is the entire quote:

Professor Warshauer’s merry-go-round includes an assembly of U.S. Supreme Court skeleton-justices, who have been working to bring us back to the bad old days of the 1950s, when only white males and patriarchal white females could fearlessly access every economic, social, and political benefit in the United States.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson can’t safeguard the freedoms that we all need and that had been built into our lives, case by case, over the past several decades alone.

There are only three of them, and it takes at least five to control a ruling.

No Warshauer Hallowe’en display would be complete without a gallery of tombstone quotes, and this merry-go-round has one, plus a large one about ecosystems collapse by Greta Thunberg:

 

We who understand that the driver of ecosystems collapse is human overpopulation are still waiting for Greta Thunberg to address this, but it’s still good to this this panel.

Too many humans, consuming too many resources on a finite planet, and discarding trash in the oceans and other waterways, carelessly using nuclear energy until the next reactor meltdown ruins yet more land and water, are behind this problem. We are now at 8.06 billion humans. This is insane.

As I wrote that overpopulation quote on the board, a father and his toddler daughter were next to me. I didn’t bother discussing this with them. As it is, I read, research, write, and publish about this topic, while most of my species just doesn’t want to contemplate it, let alone hear about it.

Which brings me to the next panel: it features the blood-oozing little corpses of children clad in incongruously cartoon-patterned clothing at the feet of the bearers of assault rifles.

Any angry lunatic who wants a gun seems to be able to access one. This has got to be changed no matter how irate it makes those who care more about having access to assault rifles than about preventing another Uvalde or Sandy Hook massacre. I can’t forget about those decapitated little kids in cartoon-patterned outfits in their classrooms at Uvalde, and Attorney Josh Koskoff won’t, either. I hope he keeps fighting this fight; he is careful, meticulous, and doesn’t let the excitement of the thought of hasty but legally unreliable strategies derail him. He will plot his moves so that no progress in this fight will be lost, at least not by him. See:

The Lawyer Trying to Hold Gunmakers Responsible for Mass Shootings

Josh Koskoff’s legal victory against Remington has raised the possibility of a new form of gun control: lawsuits against the companies that make assault rifles.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made the cut, too. His petty, homophobic and transphobic fight against the Disney company, which works to the economic detriment of his state, got a display.

And, of course, democracy’s hopes, pinned on the outcomes of the various indictments against Donald J. Trump, are included:

If we expect to continue as a democratic nation-state, this bully must be convicted of his crimes and locked up.

It is my opinion that Trump has early-onset Alzheimer’s. He slurs his speech, he goes about his activities in an erratic, forgetful manner, and he has a family history of this illness. His father, Frederick Christ Trump Sr., malingered for years with it.

Donald Trump is also morbidly obese; he eats out of a fast-food bucket, convinced that if he doesn’t, someone will poison him. Cheating at golf as he rides around in a golf cart won’t get the weight off no matter how many lies he tells about it. Trump is 77 years old to Joe Biden’s 80, but Biden is thin, fit, eats a decent diet (a little ice cream is okay!), and he gets some exercise, riding a bicycle.

With my photographs taken, I completed my annual visit to Professor’s Warshauer’s front yard.

I had parked on a side street of a side street, and in the yard near where my car was, I saw a giant Jack Skellington, which I couldn’t resist photographing:

We have plenty of nightmares before Christmas this year: the war in Ukraine, whose people we must continue to help to keep their country independent and their democracy intact, the disaster of the Israel-Gaza conflict, and the question of who will be the next Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to name a few.

Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker!

Yes, I know…he’s a Democrat, and we don’t have enough of them in the House to have him get the post, but he’s the one who is qualified and willing to work for the common good.

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor for President Bill Clinton, has blogged about the Truth as a Common Good, and how that must be the driving force of political decisions in order to maintain a healthy, functioning democracy. He’s right.

We know what we need to do, and to have done by our elected representatives and leaders.

We the people must elect representatives and leaders who will do it: protect democracy, appoint qualified and ethical justices to our federal courts at all levels, and work for the common good.

Vote for them! And…petition them in between elections to do what we elect them to do.

The post Unhappy Hallowe’en – Round and Round the Fascists Go appeared first on QueenBeeEdit | QueenBeeBooks.

It’s August 2, 2023. It’s Earth Overshoot Day…for the planet as a whole.

For individual nations, the dates vary, depending on the standard of living for each one.

The higher that standard, the more resource use, and thus the earlier the Overshoot Day for whichever nation you focus on.

 

We’ve done it again: we humans have reproduced way too much, put far more pressure on our planet’s ecosystems and resources than it can bear, and are thus living at a deficit.

A visit to www.worldometers.info can confirm our species’ population count:

On a finite planet with a carrying capacity for under 2 billion humans, we have well over 8 billion of us, with no signs of slowing down.

The planet cannot and will not enable us to continue doing this.

It doesn’t have enough of what all of us need to survive: food, water, space, clean air – to name just a few essential items.

Think of it as the Earth’s bank account.

We’re overdrawn.

The debt is coming due.

With a bank account, you can’t take out any more once you’ve depleted the funds.

We’re living on credit.

Bankruptcy is imminent.

You can see it in the news of ecosystems collapse.

Just look at the article that The New York Times published this week about the dying lands in Iraq, with saline-riddled, stagnant water, and hardly any of that.

Middle East | A Climate Warning from the Cradle of Civilization

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/world/middleeast/iraq-water-crisis-desertification.html

Dust blows in and covers nearly or completely abandoned human settlements while livestock starve to death and ISIS militants have an ever-easier time moving around because they don’t have to worry about crossing rivers now that those rivers have dried up.

Remember the Fertile Crescent that we studied in junior high school, the “cradle of civilization”?

It’s used up.

People are crowding into cities because they can’t make a living by farming, which was what they enjoyed doing. They had far more personal space and autonomy, and the self-esteem that comes from the ability to earn their own living through their own efforts.

Now they can’t do that.

Instead, they will live in tight spaces, close together, and struggle to find work that they hate and are unfamiliar with. Bosses will be impatient with them. Resources will be strained in cities, too.

Governments will not be able to fix what’s broken: overpopulation, with humans compressed together far too closely, with nowhere else to go, not enough to do, and not enough opportunity for health care, education, and work.

Situations like that breed violence.

Nonviolent movements for civil societies will be hard-pressed to solve such problems, too.

You can’t induce a government that is inclined toward authoritarianism to respect individual liberty when it can’t even offer its people enough resources to live comfortable happy lives, whether that government tends toward a religious brand of authoritarianism or a collectivist one.

And the democracies of the world are not immune to these risks.

We have MAGA morons in the U.S. House and Senate right now (well, the MAGA majority is in the House, but the Senate has them too) who are working hard at avoiding their duties to take care of the nation while attacking the freedoms that we had, still have, and need for our American democracy to continue.

You know the litany of them by now if you follow the news: abortion access, birth control, same-sex marriage, environmental protections, voting rights, restraints on corporate greed…and so on.

Not only that, but we have had some heat waves this summer, and next summer promises to be even hotter.

What will that do to us?

Let’s see…

Deaths due to heat exhaustion and heat stroke due to an unmet need for air conditioning and building construction that makes hot boxes (that literally cook people);Sea level rise that will soon inundate places that are currently at sea level, such as Florida, as the ice shelves break off into glaciers and melt;Far more human migrations than we are currently seeing, as people flee to cooler areas, which will alter the political maps of our country.

Connecticut is a nice, liberal, politically blue state…and I wonder for how long, once climate change, global warming, and ecosystems collapse catches up with us all.

Our food choices will have to change. Love almonds? They require far too much water. Anything that bees need to pollinate? People love their grassy expanses of green lawns too much to think about not using ANY insecticides, so don’t hold on too tightly to the idea of having fresh fruits and vegetables and as much of them as we need for much longer.

Dire consequences of a warming planet have already happened.

I just read The Heat Will Kill You First by Rolling Stone magazine’s climate reporter, Jeff Goodell, and it was excellent.

One story that really stuck with me – and he will be pleased that it did – is about the 2003 heat wave that hit Paris, France.

Those beautiful apartments with the curved, blue metal roofs on the 6th floors are ovens that cooked humans to death…and melted the ones that weren’t found and removed immediately. The melt oozed down into the units below, causing a visceral horror that that genre of movies could never compete with for those who smelled it.

Why was it so bad? Those roofs are made of zinc.

As I read about that, I thought of something that could be done: rip those zinc roofs off of those buildings, and build greenhouses on all of those top floors. And…make them pretty, with the tops shaped like those roofs. Sure, they would be clear glass, but they would grow food, and they would contain lots of green plants that capture carbon dioxide as they cool the city air.

It’s France, where things are expected to be beautiful, so make the change attractive – keep that shape that Haussmann’s Paris is prized and famous for.

But they have to stay, cry historic preservationists. They are UNESCO World Heritage Sites!

This really is carrying historic preservation too far – and this is coming from someone who thinks the ideal vacation is one spent in museums, viewing art, history, and culture while listening to a knowledgeable guide lecture about it.

I love it so much that I wrote a novel about a trip up the Rhone River, and included an issue that we should be aware of in the plot: biopreparat and bioterrorism. It’s cheap – cheaper than chemical or nuclear terrorism. That novel is called Intrigue On a Longship Cruise.

Kindle | Amazon Print | Nook | IngramSpark – Print | Kobo | Google Books 

I’m also someone who has worked as a historic interpreter, at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut (and at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, across the yard from it).

I wrote about it, too, in The Visitor Experience at the Mark Twain House.

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So…we humans have a choice to make that far too few of us are willing to make: we must make changes in our food, our use of chemicals on our ecosystems, and most of all, we must stop reproducing as much as most of us want to, or we shall soon have great misery – up close and personal.

That misery will include aggressive, violent crowds, insufficient water, little personal space, not enough work, food, or adequate education, and we will find our homes flooded away, awash in plastic pollution and chemical waste, erased by tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and even earthquakes from land recission caused by sucking the ground dry of all water.

“How does this happen?!,” people might ask.

“It’s not fair!”

Fair? What does that have to do with it?

Bill Maher did a clever thing on his show this spring about human attitudes toward facing our situation and actually doing something about it.

The episode, the 9th one of Season 21 for Real Time with Bill Maher, and 629th of all, aired on March 24, 2023. The guests at the discussion table were Scott Galloway and Annie Lowrey. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27248627/

Here are their Wikipedia pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Lowrey

Galloway is a professor, author, speaker, businessperson, and entrepreneur with an M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is 58 years old.

Lowrey is a Harvard-educated journalist. She is 39 years old, and has 2 children.

Bill Maher raised the topic of human overpopulation and the pressure that is it putting on the finite resources and space of the Earth.

Then he sat back and let them have at it with this topic.

I knew what was going to happen:

2 educated people, who sound very reasonable and intelligent about everything else, suddenly didn’t.

Instead, Lowrey said that she was sure that the planet’s resources could be arranged in such a way that everyone’s needs – even more than 8 or 9 or 10 billion – could be accommodated.

(Never mind that human greed and laziness will impede such efforts, and that this therefore won’t happen.)

Next, Galloway spoke…and gave the game away: “I want grandkids!”

And there it is: people don’t care that we are ending life as we know by recklessly consuming resources at a deficit. They want what they want – to pass on their own phenotypes to more humans and see them repeated – consequences be damned.

And that, humans, is how we have gotten into overshoot so early, year after year after year.

The post It’s Earth Overshoot Day – Again, and Well Before the Year is Over appeared first on QueenBeeEdit | QueenBeeBooks.

It’s official: as of November 15, 2022, there are 8 billion humans on the planet Earth.

For full details, visit: https://www.worldometers.info

Congratulations, humans – in just 12 years, we have increased our numbers by another billion.

United Nations estimates for our milestones of billions of humans are:

1804: We hit 1 billion humans.

1927: 2 billion humans.

1960: 3 billion humans.

1974: 4 billion humans.

1987: 5 billion humans.

1999: 6 billion humans.

2011/2012: 7 billion humans.

2022: 8 billion humans!

You can watch the data about our progressively increasing numbers throughout the Earth’s history on this YouTube video called Human Population Throughout Time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE

This is nothing to brag about or cheer for.

We do not need more babies.

However wonderful, however talented, however whatever admirable attribute a human being is, it is not a blessing to be brought into a world that cannot accommodate their needs.

Education for those of us who are already here instead of reproduction is an excellent idea, clamoring for grandkids from previous generations be damned.

I recommend responding to such unreasonable, selfish nonsense with a spate of data supporting this argument, and condemning their emotional desire to see their own phenotypes repeated on another human and coo over a baby.

That impulse must be denied! It’s not cute when there aren’t enough resources to fuel a baby with a comfortable, happy life, which the previous generations enjoyed.

If those generations can’t ensure that the next ones can live as well as they did, they shouldn’t reproduce.

The Earth is still the same size that it has been all along.

It cannot and will not accommodate all of the humans that parents choose to bring into existence…or all of the humans that religious fanatics and fascists force them to bring into existence by outlawing abortions and blocking access to birth control.

This is ecocide, and it is condemning the next generations of humans – people who are already in existence – to a miserable life on a used-up planet.

The Ecocide Award goes to:

CatholicismIslamThe Bible Belt of the U.S.A.Wealthy “Farmers” as I call banksters, hedge fundsters, and corporatist Libertarians who want to eviscerate and erase all social welfare programs by buying politicians who will do their bidding just to stay in office.The cult of MAGA Moronism, a.k.a. the unthinking, emotion-driven mob that simply wants something to cling on to as resources dwindle.

There is a succinct word for what that last item describes: a mob. Mobs are dangerous. They riot.

The danger – the security risk to all that they come into contact with – ought to be apparent.

It won’t be great for the dead, either. Well…for disposal of the dead:

Cemeteries are overflowing. Cremation makes more sense than burial, but how long until we lack the resources to cremate our dead? That’s going to be a problem.

When I traveled in France, it was already a problem, and I discussed this with our guide there. She told me that corpses get evicted from cemeteries to a mass grave after 30 years.

I just released a new novel that deals with the issue of human overpopulation on a finite planet.

Here it is: Intrigue On a Longship Cruise.

 

Available in paperback and as an e-book at:

Kindle | Amazon Print | Nook | IngramSpark – Print | Kobo | Google Books 

It involves that trip to France, as a fictitious travel story, complete with color photographs of historic sites, gourmet food, souvenirs, and more.

What more? Well…something worse than murder, that’s what. Read it to find out.

And then reflect on the path to starvation, deprivation, and crushing disappointment for the next generation that is coming up as we experience species die-offs, depletions of food supplies, the end of pollinators such as bees and butterflies, droughts that are already a reality in much of North America and elsewhere, and competition for whatever resources remain.

I’ve written and blogged about all this many times, and will continue to do so.

But far too few of us pay attention to that to make a difference in the future.

The Democratic Party of the United States has been accused of becoming weak by being that of the educated elite, thus turning into a minority enclave of logical thinkers in a majority of angry, emotional others.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have devolved into a power-grabbing, scamming cabal of Farmers that wants to control fertility against the will of the people. It just narrowly missed doing that in several states during the mid-term elections, but we had better hurry up with a national codification of the right to abortion on demand before they try to shove the opposite down everyone’s throats.

Already, they have done that in several states, further straining the resources of women who cannot afford to birth and raise any more children, even if they want them. Women have had to spend money that they didn’t have to travel to abortion-friendly states, pay to stay overnight there, get abortions, and return home, when they previously had the option of going twenty minutes away from home instead. But…they weren’t pregnant with an unwanted, unaffordable fetus when abortion was a protected right all over the United States. They got pregnant after the national right to a safe, legal abortion was removed and made inaccessible in their home states.

And it’s no vacation, traveling for an abortion. It’s physically exhausting to make a fast round-trip with no rest or time to heal.

Low-wage workers bear financial brunt of denied abortions

https://apnews.com/article/abortion-health-business-religion-texas-8a0e8965908750ac9e3f43f1765ebd62

We can thank the GOP Republicans and MAGA fascists for that. There are many illogical and controlling legislators who want us to live with the following conditions:

Every sex act to be aimed at reproducing.No birth control.No abortions.

They don’t think about the consequences of that, nor do they want to face the fact that this is completely unrealistic. Humans are not going to stop having sex for pleasure – ever. To suggest that laws ought to be arranged as if they would simply because a fanatical few believe that they should is dangerously delusional, and we cannot afford it.

The Great Depression ought to have taught us that, but the coronavirus pandemic just reminded us that collective human memory only goes back about 90 years, which explains why there was so much foolish objecting to safety precautions such as masks, not touching people, and social distancing.

But those of us so-called elitists who like to study – the “educated elite” – find that information and keep showing it. Look at what unaffordable reproduction got people during the Great Depression:

Finding peace in a life sold for $2

https://nypost.com/2013/07/14/finding-peace-in-a-life-sold-for-2/

Take a close look at this image from the article:

 

I know most people won’t hold the memory of it in their minds, but I’ll make the effort anyway by showing all this.

Meanwhile, here we are, despite many efforts at birth control and keeping abortion safe, legal, and accessible: 8 billion humans on a planet that isn’t increasing in size along with our numbers.

So…congratulations, humans! We have far too much of a good thing, a bad thing, and an in-between thing, namely far too many humans.

The post Population 8 Billion – Congratulations, Humans: We Have Over-Reproduced! appeared first on QueenBeeEdit.

4 years ago, I took a river cruise up the Rhône in the South of France with my mother. I wrote a blog post about it, complete with photographs, and this is the story that developed from that trip.

It was a wonderful experience, and we met lots of interesting and nice people, both the passengers and the crew of our ship.

My mother exhorted me to write a murder mystery that takes place on the ship, covering a week’s worth of time, just as our trip did. I thought that over, looked at novels by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and P.D. James, and realized that, much as I loved reading their work, that is not the right genre for me.

Therefore, I wrote what I know: a novel that deals with the issues I research. Human overpopulation on a finite planet with a collapsing ecosystem was not left out, as it is a fixture in my novels. Added to that is another issue that I researched for this story.

Intrigue On a Longship Cruise is part travelogue, complete with photographs, and part mystery-adventure story. It is a travel novel that includes a threat that we should all be aware of.

This novel continues the story of Arielle, the woman who took in the alien botanist Ileandra in What the Small Gray Visitor Said, but with a different situation: Arielle and her aunt, Eloise, have gone on a river cruise in the South of France, up the Rhône River, for a vacation together after the pandemic.

It has two stories in one: a travelogue of a luxury cruise, complete with color photographs that include gourmet dining, the national marionette of France, perfume, historic and archaeological sites, art, plus a tale of murder, and the threat of something much worse than murder. What could be worse than murder, you might ask? Read it to find out.

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The post Intrigue On a Longship Cruise – A Novel and a Travelogue…and a Threat to Understand appeared first on QueenBeeEdit.

As I have watched and read the news reports about the ongoing genocide in Ukraine, I have wondered about the soldiers that Putin sent there.

The question that nagged at me was, what sort of soldiers are these, who are committing so many war crimes?

We live in an age with many treaties against such practices, and there is an International Criminal Court to deal with perpetrators of them.

The stories that have come out of this attempted theft of Ukraine – this attempt by Vlad the Invader Putin to reconstitute the entire territory of the former Soviet Union regardless of whether the people in those areas want that or not – are just like the worst of the Dark Ages, the Medieval times, and other horrific periods in history.

This question has nagged at me since I wrote about this invasion in April, fantasizing about delivering a gourmet meal of poetic justice to Putin:

Polonium Chicken Kyiv

https://www.queenbeeedit.com/polonium-chicken-kyiv/

Yes…I know that Putin has tasters, lives as a recluse, and would never let anyone serve him a meal other than his chef.

Which brings me back to those soldiers.

They’re not just soldiers.

Putin didn’t have enough of those when the invasion started, so he had his chef serve up more.

This chef is also a businessman. His name is Yevgeny Prigozhin. He heads the Wagner Group, a private military company of mercenaries, and also the de facto private army of Vladimir Putin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group

The chef harvested his crop at various Russian maximum-security prisons. Those are the places where rapists and murders are locked up, usually for life, because they are monsters in human bodies who belong in cages, not out among normal humans.

His sales pitch to a prison full of rapists and murders can be viewed in this clip via Twitter:

https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1570864032672026624

An article in The Intercept gives full detail about all this:

Mercenary LawyersInside the Aggressive Legal War to Shield the Founder of Russia’s Wagner Group

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/19/russia-hack-wagner-group-yevgeny-prigozhin/

In my blog post about what these monsters have done, I gave a short and varied list of the crimes that Russian troops have perpetrated upon Ukrainians, and I shall quote the 1st item from that list here:

A woman, naked except for a fur coat, was found dead in a basement in Ukraine after being kept as a captive sex slave, raped repeatedly by who knows how many invaders, and then shot to death when they left the area. I wonder what she had wanted to spend her life doing, had it been on her own terms. Whatever it was, she was robbed of it most horridly and appallingly.

Since I first found out about her, I have wondered who she was, and what the story of her life had been up until those monsters got a hold of her. It is that story that defines who she was, not the manner of her death.

Well, that question has been answered by a story in The New York Times:

Three Women of Bucha: Their Deaths and Lives

New reporting illuminates the fortitude of three women — a former public servant, an animal lover, a grandmother — who were victims of Russian brutality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/15/world/europe/ukraine-bucha-women-russia.html

I won’t retell the article’s entire contents here. Readers can click the link provided if they really want to read about all 3 of those women. But I will talk about that woman.

Her name was Oksana. Oksana Sulyma. She was a beautiful blonde woman in her thirties who lived in Kyiv, and she had traveled to Bucha, which is north of Kyiv, to visit friends with whom she had grown up, and her grandmother, just 48 hours before that city was invaded. She got stuck there.

When the city was retaken by Ukrainian soldiers, Oksana was found with a gunshot wound to her head.

That’s the particular crime that I have thought about most since I first read about it, despite the litany of other crimes that have been reported, and I have been observing the others, cheering on the destruction of the bridge that connected Crimea to Ukraine, and being appalled at the savagery elsewhere. It just keeps coming back to mind.

The infrastructure of Ukraine is being deliberately destroyed with the intent to starve and freeze the Ukrainian people to death this coming winter, with no water, and it is coming soon.

And Iran, with its theocratic autocracy, is happy to help Putin inflict this misery. One autocrat to another, its top mullah is no fan of democracy. Whatever offends the democratic nations of the world makes Iran happy.

Religion, as I often say, is poison. Killing in the name of religion rather than helping others to have good lives and be safe and happy is the antithesis of religious duty, yet warlike impulses tend to be fanned to an inferno with any religion that gains a huge following. This is adding to the misery in Ukraine.

Russian Barrage Targets Power, Water and Heat for Ukraine’s Civilians

The stepped-up attacks on cities, including through the heavy use of Iranian-made exploding drones, threaten a new sort of humanitarian crisis for Ukrainians this winter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/world/europe/ukraine-russia-blackout-water.html

That point needs emphasis: Ukraine is a freezing cold place in the winter.

Residences have holes that let in the cold and fail to retain heat, even after patchy repair efforts.

Ukrainians are chopping down forests for firewood, seeing little other immediate option.

In Shattered Homes, Ukrainians Brace for a Cold Winter

In cities and towns battered by the war, residents worry about how to heat their homes as temperatures drop. But even in places spared from the worst of the fighting, Russian strikes on infrastructure have raised new fears.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/world/europe/ukraine-heat-winter.html

And that just leads me to think about nonrenewable resources, and the fact that forests take centuries to grow back once chopped down. Once they’re gone, the Ukrainians won’t even have that option.

Ukraine has been the bread-basket of Europe for a long time.

Its flag reflects this, yellow across the bottom and blue across the top, representing a wheat field under a clear blue sky.

 

Now that it is under siege, it has 2 logistical problems regarding its wheat crop: the safety and resources with which to grow it is severely compromised, and the safety and resources with which to export is severely compromised.

What does this mean for people, both in and outside of Ukraine?!

It means that people will starve. The Ukrainians need to make money from growing wheat, and people in Africa and elsewhere need those wheat shipments. Famines have been spreading there.

But back to Ukraine.

Putin is running out of cannon fodder. After he has used up his crop of prison monsters, he has conscripted lawyers, accountants, and factory workers, among others, from Russia’s adult male population. They are just regular people, not monsters, who don’t agree with his plan to wage war and devastation on Ukraine, and they don’t want to die or get maimed helping him do it. Many conscripts are middle-aged.

Many others have fled Russia rather than commit genocide under duress, leaving the women they were with alone, perhaps permanently. That’s another form of misery that this selfish autocrat has inflicted, this time on his own people.

Where Have All the Men in Moscow Gone?

Across the capital, there are noticeably fewer men at restaurants, stores and social gatherings. Many have been called up to fight in Ukraine. Others have fled to avoid being drafted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/world/europe/russia-moscow-army-draft.html

This summer, we had a block party on our street, to get to know all of our neighbors and to reconnect with the ones that we already knew. It was fun, and we met a Ukrainian-American family. They have a vehicle with a bumper sticker about the invasion of Ukraine:

I asked their oldest son to open the garage door and let me photograph this, and he was happy to do so. They have relatives in Ukraine, and I was happy to find out that those relatives live in the western part of the country – far from the invaders.

The plans to inflict yet more mass murder and misery on Ukraine continue, as the Russians have set up mines to detonate a huge dam at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. Once destroyed, it will release 18 million cubic meters of water in 80 settlements, and affect 200,000 people. “Affect” means flood them out, destroy their homes, freeze them, leave them with no possessions, no family photographs, nothing to show evidence of their individual existences but what survivors will create later.

Zelensky: Russia mines Kakhovka dam, threatens to flood Kherson

https://kyivindependent.com/national/zelensky-russia-mines-kakhovka-dam-threatens-to-flood-kherson

Another remark by Bill Maher comes to mind: “Humans are not good people.”

He’s not the only one to say that, just the most recent.

Humans are capable of despicable cruelty, of refusing to think critically and of forming and joining feral mobs that rip other humans apart or otherwise torture them to death, and of covering it up.

And yet, not all humans are rotten people. History has plenty of examples of that, too.

A history professor who lives near me, Matt Warshauer, has put up his annual political-themed Hallowe’en display in his front yard in West Hartford, Connecticut, and this year’s theme is Ukraine.

His website is www.themindfulprofessor.com – check it out for this and previous years’ artwork.

He makes everything out of recycled materials, which he then dismantles and uses again to build the next year’s display.

Professor Warshauer shows us Ukrainian soldiers and a tank, Ukrainian refugees being welcomed in Poland, and a graveyard for democracy, showing the damages that MAGA morons, Trump, and the machinations of Mitch McConnell and the George Mason University-funded Libertarians have wrought on the United States Supreme Court.

 

 

 

Professor Warshauer always includes a board for people to write on, and black Sharpie markers stuck into it for us. Here is what I wrote on it:

That’s not all that I have been writing.

I have a new novel to release, one that will be available in print and in various digital venues, including Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Google Play Books, Kobo, and Draft2Digital.

 

It is called Intrigue On a Longship Cruise, and it is full of color photographs from a cruise that I took 4 years ago with my mother up the Rhône River. While we were on it, we met lots of interesting people, and saw famous and beautiful sites in the South of France, and ate delectable food on the ship.

My mother exhorted me to write a novel involving that trip. She suggested a murder mystery, but Agatha Christie already did that to perfection on a different river – the Nile – and that is not a genre that I felt at home with, so I opted for a different angle.

This story involves a threat of a completely different kind, one that looms larger than an individual murder, though it does have a bit of that in it as well.

There are people from all over America, Canada, and Australia aboard this ship, plus some from France, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, and Russia. They are of different political persuasions, too, and MAGA moronism is not left out, nor are its threats and consequences.

Get the novel and read about luxury river cruises, wine, gourmet food, the national marionette of France, perfume, historic and archaeological sites, art, the effects of human overpopulation, murder, and the threat of something much worse than murder.

What could be worse than murder, you might ask?

Read it to find out.

The post Happy Hallowe’en – Putin Set Maximum-Security Felons on Ukraine appeared first on QueenBeeEdit.

It’s Earth Overshoot Day again.

July 28th, 2022 – we have done it again, topping, as usual, the foolish behavior of previous years.

As a planet-full of humans, we’ve used up all of the resources that the Earth can generate in a year…with more than 5 months left in it.

Here are some graphics from the Global Footprint Network to illustrate this point:

 

If we all lived like the people in wealthy, industrialized nations, we would need more Earths than we actually have:

www.footprintnetwork.org

We are operating at a deficit now.

We humans are not as intelligent as we like to think we are.

Watch what Hanabiko “Koko” the Gorilla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)), a fascinating female gorilla who was taught sign language, had to say in her last message to our species. She could form ideas and phrases and express them, and she had a few things to say to our species before she died at the age of 46.

Look at those screenshots, even if you don’t click on the video to watch it. The subtitles are androcentric, by the way. I don’t know whose fault that is, but it’s relevant, because I will discuss the damage to the planet that misogyny is causing. “Mankind” – we women are not part of it. If men want to take all credit for that, and for trying to force us all to reproduce until our health is ruined, fine, but collectively, we are humankind, and lots of us are voting for saving the Earth. Not enough to get the job done, though, hence the message that Koko had for us.

Koko the Gorilla’s Last Video – Message for Humans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfj1o9kYgzw

She called us stupid. That’s not going far enough. Our species is moronic.

Just when we should be scaling back, we’re doing the opposite, and in every way.

The planet is heating up, and houses are bursting into flames in Britain.

France, Spain, and Portugal are having terrible wildfires.

‘Heat apocalypse’ warning in western France as thousands flee wildfire

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/18/heat-apocalypse-warning-western-france-thousands-flee-wildfire

We’re not used to Europe having that much heat. It’s usually a lot colder there, to the point that people who live in Britain are amazed to find themselves wilting in heat that Americans are used to. At least, that’s how my father described it when he was in graduate school in England, out with his camera on a hot summer day, watching the Brits complain as they sweated out a hot day that was nothing unusual to him back in Connecticut. It’s becoming usual to them now…

100% of Oklahoma is experiencing drought, says the U.S. Drought Monitor.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?OK

Lake Mead in Nevada is even scarier – it’s drying up, and 25 million people depend on it for water.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?NV

As of the end of May 2022, it was at 26.63% capacity, and is likely at less than that now.

25 million people – out of 334 million Americans.

And they can’t all just relocate to solve that problem.

After Roe Fell: Abortion Laws State by State

https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-state/

This entire map ought to be light blue – the color assigned for states that have expanded and protected abortion rights and access.

But no…only a few states are. It’s not a matter of simply living where laws are to one’s liking. This misogynist situation will get women killed. It is already threatening women who have miscarried wanted pregnancies. They need the same procedure – a dilation and curettage – that is used for abortions in order to remove all remaining tissue. It has to come out, or else the necrotic tissue left behind will kill them. Doctors are unable to help thanks to this monstrous legal situation, and women can’t all just travel to Connecticut, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington State, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, or Vermont.

More babies is the last thing that the ecosystem needs, and forcing women to carry each and every pregnancy to term, wanted or not, healthy to the woman or not, viable on its own or not, is idiocy and misogyny.

Here is the latest count of humans, from www.worldometers.info:

We’re almost at 8 billion, and our planet can only support less than 2 billion.

Meanwhile, some MAGA moron, motivated by an utterly irresponsible MAGA political candidate by the name of Kandiss Taylor, has blown up America’s Stonehenge, known as the Georgia Guidestones.

A Georgia monument, seen by some as satanic, was damaged from a predawn explosion

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/06/1110210885/georgia-guidestones-monument-damaged-explosion

The people who live in the town where this was done intend to rebuild it as it was.

Satanic?! Name-calling is what the stupid resort to when they don’t like well-researched data and logic.

Those stones appear on the cover of Book 2 of my Nae-Née novels: Vaccine: The Cull.

Here are some more numbers www.worldometers.info:

I keep showing these numbers because they keep increasing.

They shouldn’t be doing that.

It’s not cute to be having more, more, more babies to fuel human egos for legacies when all that we can realistically leave to the next generation is a planet with less water, decreased fertile soil and therefore decreased growing capacity, rising sea levels, desertification of the land that we live on, and ever-rising temperatures that put us at risk of heat exhaustion and, worse, heat stroke.

But far too many just don’t care. They want babies. They want legacies. They want all the grandchildren they can get, and damn the consequences.

There are plenty of consequences to look at right now.

Ecological economists like Herman Daly, who started warning us over 50 years ago that this is not a reasonable way to operate, are not being listened to as they ought to be.

This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/18/magazine/herman-daly-interview.html

Pioneering, they call him in this article. He was pioneering when he started his career, in the late 1960s, but now what he tells us has been echoed, corroborated, and echoed again for decades.

Monarch Butterflies Are Now an Endangered Species

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/monarch-butterflies-are-now-an-endangered-species

It’s good that this article tries to be optimistic about humans “pitching in” by taking care of their yards without using insecticides, but that’s not the whole story. These butterflies migrate south to north and back again, stopping at 4 different places, the locations of which are non-negotiable.

Trump, the idiot 45th pseudo-POTUS who was so unqualified for that job, ordered a border wall to be constructed at one of those sites, razing what was a protected butterfly habitat. It has had a reprieve, but right-wing conspiracy theorists continue to harass the people that run the habitat.

Butterfly Sanctuary That Stood Up to Trump’s Border Wall Closes After Right-Wing Threats

https://www.ecowatch.com/butterfly-sanctuary-threats.html

Koko was right: our species is a stupid one.

Aliens who visit us from other planets haven’t yet tried to communicate with us as a species. They study us, but they don’t deign to open diplomatic relations with us, and why should they?! We’re wrecking our own habitat. They’ve no doubt been there and done that, and know that there is no reasoning with the stupid and reckless – namely, us. Yes…our government, during the quarantine of the coronavirus pandemic, admitted that U.F.O.’s are not hoaxes, but real. A Harvard University astronomer, Avi Loeb, found what may be a fragment of a probe from another solar system and wrote about that object: ʻOumuamua – “Scout” in Hawaiian. Here is his book about that:

 

It was a fascinating read.

I wrote a story about a stranded female alien botanist who did discuss such things with us – but, again, not as a species. She restricted her comments to only 2 humans, humans who were not stupid.

And why not?! The majority of us, when acting as a group, have demonstrated ourselves to be a lost cause. We just won’t stop using fossil fuels, strewing plastic all over the planet and saturating the oceans with tiny particles of it, and we still use nuclear fission energy. We ought to stop that and focus on development of fusion energy, figure that out, and clean up Chernobyl and Fukushima properly. But, of course, I’m always looking for logic, whether there is any to be found or not.

What the Small Gray Visitor Said is available at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08GQQH4TK/

Since I like to present wonky data and pile it on, here is another scary news item for you:

NASA satellite images show how much Lake Mead has receded since 2000

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dramatic-nasa-satellite-images-show-lake-mead-water-levels-receded-200-rcna39803

NASA says that climate change and severe drought did this.

And here is some even worse news:

‘Climate Catastrophe’ Feared as Congo Moves to Sell Critical Ecosystem for Oil Drilling

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/07/25/climate-catastrophe-feared-congo-moves-sell-critical-ecosystem-oil-drilling

Here is the extent of what is at stake:

“Twenty-seven oil and three gas blocks are scheduled to be auctioned off to the highest bidding corporations on July 28 and 29. The roughly 11 million hectares of land up for grabs in the Congo Basin—whose rainforest trails only the Amazon in size and is more intact—include parts of Virunga National Park, home to a key gorilla sanctuary, as well as tropical peatlands that prevent massive amounts of planet-heating carbon from reaching the atmosphere.”

The Paris Climate Agreement won’t work if this is done.

The Congolese people are looking at other options for getting money to fuel their economy, but they say that they need money, and won’t pay for saving the climate by having nothing. They want the comfortable, wealthy nations of the world to help them with that, and thus far, nothing significant is forthcoming. Meanwhile, no significant effort at scaling back human reproducing is forthcoming, either!

Brazil is doing nothing to protect its rainforest. In fact, it is actively taking away legal protections for it, allowing native people to get murdered while doing little to nothing about that, and its leader has an appalling attitude:

“Since Brazil’s return to democratic rule in 1985 after two decades of military rule, most successive governments have made moves to extend the legal protection, and today about 47% of the Amazon lies within protected areas, according to official data. Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, however, has repeatedly said the country has too many protected areas and stalled this decades-long policy.”

Report: Brazil authorities pay no mind to deforestation

https://apnews.com/article/travel-forests-brazil-parks-national-42d20c3115f28ff3feb75e540fb53633

Too many protected areas?! Apparently, protecting the ecosystem doesn’t suit Jair Bolsonaro. He would prefer to use up the Earth, and resents having any obligation to protect the part of it that not only is in his political territory, but needs it more than other areas, because it has a crucial, oxygen-replenishing, rainforest in it. No sympathy. Save it!

But back to the insane anti-abortion attitude in the United States.

No 10-year-old should have to compete with an embryo or fetus for her health, let alone her life.

Fox News (again, how dare it share my cool last name!) ought to be prosecuted for reckless endangerment of the doctor who helped that 10-year-old girl from Ohio. She aborted the pregnancy from the rapist who attacked that kid, and for that, her name and photograph were put on that channel. Jesse Watters of Fox News is definitely trying to get that doctor killed – for doing the right thing!

If you want to help fight this, here is a petition about it:

Call on prosecutors to charge FOX News for recklessly endangering the life of an abortion doctor!

https://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/209/766/137/

When I tour historic sites and historical society exhibits, and see what the lives of women in the 18th and 19th centuries were like, I am sometimes asked if I would have liked to have lived then.

My answer is always no.

However fascinated I am by history, and however beautiful the gowns that the elite women of those times wore, the facts of herstory tell me to say a resounding “NO.”

The fashions with their corsets burst livers, forced women to carry around eighty pounds of clothing, and were terribly uncomfortable to the point of being threats to health as well to mobility. It was only when Coco Chanel went to work during World War I and designed comfortable, ankle-length sailor dresses out of jersey cotton that women were finally freed.

But that’s only the beginning of my “NO”.

It is when I read and hear the life stories of the women on those centuries that I get angry.

They had no birth control, abortion was dangerous and being attacked by politicians and physicians who wanted all female competition for medical business eradicated, and women routinely died of puerperal fever – also known as childbed fever.

This was caused by physicians’ failure and, once a few physicians and scientists looked into the question, a refusal on the part of a lazy majority who wouldn’t take them seriously, to wash hands after touching dead patients and before touching live ones with open tissue wounds from having just given birth.

It took decades for hand-washing to catch on.

Meanwhile, women died unnecessarily.

Their husbands then moved on and remarried, free to live their lives and have sex again.

Their husbands had careers that they could expect to pursue without interruptions caused by babies and, perhaps, death due to babies.

Not the women.

The few who did pursue careers had to risk their lives in childbirth and shortly after.

What if they didn’t agree to that?

Well, their opportunities for earning a living without agreeing to get married and reproduce were sorely limited.

Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist author of the 1794 tract A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, died of puerperal fever.

Her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, had to grow up without her mother. She felt such a sense of abandonment in life – raised with a stepmother, as her father, William Godwin, of course moved on – that she too had something to write: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

I have toured the Connecticut Historical Society’s exhibits and seen the story of Prudence Punderson. She was a colonist who survived the Revolutionary War. She was the daughter of a Tory – a loyalist to the British crown. She herself disagreed, and, after the war, married physician Timothy Wells Rossiter, who supported George Washington. She bore one daughter, got puerperal fever, and died at the age of 25 or 26. And then…he married someone else.

I remember being very angry when I read that and viewed her needlework and other family artifacts. She is remembered, but just barely. Lots of other women didn’t even get that much.

My sense of empathy went into overdrive as I imagined life for women back then.

I want more – I want the certainty of all that science now makes possible: a fascinating career that enables me to leave a significant memory of my work for others to see long after I am gone, along with a long and healthy life, plus chances to have relationships without the risk of babies, or early death from them.

And now, with our planet heating up and its ecosystems overflowing with humans – far more than it can support – the U.S. Supreme Court is overpopulated with the sort of jurists who would bring us backward in time and take that away.

So much for logical thinkers.

And it’s not just them.

Mitch McConnell and the libertarian political machine that he works with has played a long game of packing U.S. Circuit Courts with more like them.

An Australian professor who watches this has outlined it all for us:

Why is American so divided on abortion? Because a key conservative player planned it that way

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-16/why-america-is-so-divided-on-abortion-and-the-men-who-planned-it/101188994

Paul Weyrich, a conservative political strategist who began working to pull America to the political right in the early 1970s, searched for the issue that would do the trick, and he found that taking away women’s bodily autonomy – attacking our right to abortion – would fit the bill.

So now we have to fight for the legal right to abortion on demand all over again, which is a huge imposition.

Already, women are suffering the health consequences of this interference in their health decisions. Having an abortion should be up to the woman, based on the scientific data presented by her doctor, as well as simply her choice.

But no; now doctors, in a mad dance of risk to women’s health as they seek to avoid legal jeopardy over a patient treatment decision, must wait until the LAST moment, or longer, before doing much-needed abortions.

Women with failing pregnancies are being forced into renal failure before they can get abortions that they need. 😡

There was such a woman in Texas. She couldn’t have a dilation and curettage abortion when it is clearly the best solution to removing necrotic (dead!) tissue from their uterus.

Mifepristone, the abortion drug that Nae-Née, the abortion/birth control nanite of my dystopian science fiction series, uses, can’t even be used by doctors who are worried about being prosecuted in misogynist states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

The Nae-Née series is available at: https://www.amazon.com/Nae-N%C3%A9e-3-Book-Series/dp/B079YVFLML/

No…doctors in such states, fearing liability for breaking that misogynist law, must now invite liability for medical malpractice instead, as that law puts the health of women behind that of a lump of cells.

They must send a woman who cannot afford to fly to say, Colorado or California and simply get an abortion there, home to wait until she is sick with a life-threatening complication first, and only then can they remove the necrotic mess from her body. Already, one woman has been sent to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Texas with renal failure.

Women Face Risks as Doctors Struggle With Medical Exceptions on Abortion

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/us/abortion-save-mothers-life.html/

Here, from the above-cited article, are reasons why abortion on demand, only to be decided between a woman and her doctor, must be legal and easy to get everywhere:

“Miscarriages occur in 15 percent of all pregnancies and may require a procedure — also used in some abortions — to remove the fetus. Pre-eclampsia, or pregnancy-induced high blood pressure, occurs in 5 to 8 percent of all pregnancies and can be deadly. There is a 2 percent chance a pregnancy can be ectopic, meaning the fertilized egg has implanted outside of the uterus, making the pregnancy nonviable and seriously threatening the life of the mother.”

So much for the sanctity of life. The GOP misogynists don’t actually care about that. What they want is political, social, and economic power, and they want it all white malestreamed. Nothing for women.

When I was in college, and the legal situation for women was a lot better in the United States, I was thought of as an angry feminist for keeping track of such things and being outraged that all things weren’t equal for women, and that anyone anywhere wanted abortion to be illegal. I even arranged a symposium on abortion that included a lecture by a history professor, a chat with a panel of two people – a female physician who practiced family medicine and had done abortions and a guy from Planned Parenthood – and a debate. I shrugged it off then – what people thought. Now I just feel vindicated.

It seems laughable now that people on my campus ever thought it of me as just some angry feminist. Why shouldn’t I be angry about all this?! More importantly, why shouldn’t anyone anywhere in this country who loves ANY woman (wife, fiancée, girlfriend, daughter, mother, sister, cousin) be angry about it?!

The same goes for the Earth. We love our home, but we don’t show it. We’re killing it, and ourselves in the process. We can’t run from this forever by becoming climate refugees. Desertification and record-breaking heat will just keep on following us.

Back to Koko’s statement about humans: We are stupid.

We needlessly bring misery upon ourselves, and then we make it worse.

The post Unhappy Earth Overshoot Day 2022 to Humans – We’re Stupid appeared first on QueenBeeEdit.