[M]otherhood is used in women’s Jan. 6 legal defenses to make women appear more sympathetic, by emphasizing their caretaking roles and status as “good” mothers and grandmothers who are devoted to their husbands and families. Such defense strategies paint a picture of these women as nurturers who love their families and are committed to raising productive citizens in an attempt to outweigh the serious charges they face.My favorite parts of the article: the "historical" context of mothers sewing KKK hoods and homeschooling. My guess is that they're teaching the kids to sew KKK hoods in those homeschools. Thank goodness no one is teaching the tykes anything horrifying in the government schools. There's an even worse image-rehabilitation program afoot: the effort to humanize fetuses by revealing their gender, which makes birthing persons more reluctant to kill them. The new DGB has its work cut out for it.
The devil you say
Orienteering Preparation
Rough Weather
Quit showing our evidence to people
Those tea leaves are hard to read
Why don't you spend your money on what I want?
Killing Giants
Dropped a big tree today. It was an old, dead Hemlock. I've been watching it for years, hoping it would lean and fall on its own where it wouldn't threaten anyone. But it was right over the road, which is really a right-of-way over my land and not a state maintained road. If it killed anybody, it was my responsibility. For a long time I hoped it might fall safely, though I always worried about it. Over the last few days, though, it began to look very dangerous.
So today -- after a VFD call in the morning -- I decided that it was time to take that responsibility. It seemed clear in its leaning and compression, but I had no idea what it was like on the inside. Once I started cutting, it might do anything. I took out the initial wedge where I wanted it to fall. In fact it almost fell after the felling cut, but instead settled back and collapsed it, becoming secure again. I made a second felling cut, three-quarters deep like the first one, and it still wouldn't fall. So now there were three very deep cuts were in it, and it seemed perfectly serene while also being totally unstable.
I put a rope on it, but my longest rope wasn't as tall as the tree. I wrapped that rope around an oak, and got the thing rocking just by pulling it myself. Still nothing.
Finally I brought my truck up, tied the rope to the hitch, and eased it taught. Then, in 4x4, I let it pull just a little more tension in the line until I heard and saw it break in the rearview mirror. Since I knew the rope was shorter than the tree, I punched the gas to break the rope and get out from under it. The thing fell exactly where I had been meaning to drop it seven hours earlier.
I sawed it into logs, and rolled them off the road and down the mountainside. My neighbor showed up for this last part, which was physically the hardest part though definitely the least dangerous.
My neighbor's wife had been there earlier, and she said that she'd noticed a couple days ago that it had gotten looking more dangerous. My neighbor himself said the same thing as we were moving the pieces, that it had really become clear that it was a danger. This evening the UPS driver showed up to pick up a package, and he remarked that he'd had his eye on that tree for a while, and had been worried about it for a long time.
Big, dead trees will kill you. Malory's knights fighting giants did no greater feat than we do when we take one of these things down.
USMC Knife Fighting, WWII Training Film
Your terms are acceptable
In his recent démarche to the U.S. demanding an end to military support for Ukraine, Putin has helpfully provided a list of those capabilities Russia most fears. The U.S. should treat this message not as a Russian ultimatum but rather as a Ukrainian shopping list.