Stephen D. Shenfield | Author and Translator
Hanging out washing to dry
- Published on 03 October 2021
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My family take pride in hanging out our washing to dry in the sun and wind – a small contribution to the fight against global heating. But we can’t help noticing that our neighbors haven’t followed our lead. Clotheslines are a rare sight hereabouts.
Recently I raised the matter on Facebook and Quora (a website where people answer one another’s questions). Why do so few people in the US hang out their laundry to dry?
One thing I learned is that it was not always so. ‘Back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s many Americans did air dry our clothes outside. But this is no longer practical for most people.’
Politics of the Trans Cult
- Published on 27 July 2021
- Hits: 286
Until about the turn of the century, ‘transsexualism’ – male individuals identifying as and wanting to become females and female individuals identifying as and wanting to become males – was a rare disorder. Its treatment was entrusted to physicians and psychiatrists, who sought to avoid, or at least delay and minimize, resort to drugs -- puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones -- and surgery, for several good reasons:
Waste and want: Grapes of Wrath revisited
- Published on 01 August 2010
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In his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25), John Steinbeck described how food was destroyed during the Great Depression:
Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.
The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges… A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships… Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them…
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot.
Beware: cell phones!
- Published on 16 August 2021
- Hits: 224
Just look at that photo! How cute! Do a search on 'kid' and 'phone' and you'll find lots of equally cute photos of little children using cell phones. Many brands are specifically designed for the toddler market. The average age at which children now get their first cell phone is six, but clearly many get one earlier. It is common to amuse babies by showing them moving images on a cell phone.
Observe that in these photos the kids are holding the phone right up against the ear, where radiation will do the most damage to their vulnerable young brains. It would be somewhat less harmful if they left a gap of an inch between ear and phone, but neither they nor their parents even realize that there is any cause for concern -- that 'children absorb more microwave radiation than adults because they are smaller, their brain tissues are more absorbent, and their skulls are thinner' (L. Lloyd Morgan, Santosh Kesari, and Devra Lee Davis, Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure, December 2014).
Captives of Coca-Cola
- Published on 14 October 2021
- Hits: 59
In July 2018 the attention of The New York Times and then Esquire magazine was somehow drawn to a mountain town in southern Mexico and the truly remarkable amount of Coca-Cola drunk by its residents. The British Broadcasting Corporation has produced a documentary on the same topic.
The town is San Cristobal, in the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state. A third of its quarter-million or so residents are of Mayan descent. Their average per capita daily consumption of ‘the friendliest drink on earth’ is a gallon – the whole of a two-liter bottle and most of a second, delivered to numerous local convenience stores from a bottling plant on the town’s outskirts.
