Lift Up Your Hearts!

It was a genealogy moment. I was thinking about Memorial Day, and that it would be good to write a post honoring my own ancestors. I couldn't think of anyone! Oh, there were plenty of ancestors who fought in wars, from before our country was founded through World War II, including both sides of the Civil War, but none who died in their service, which is what Memorial Day is all about.

"How odd," I thought. "Was our family just extraordinarily lucky?"

And then I laughed at myself. It's not odd at all. Who is it, mostly, who dies in wars? Young men! Men who go off to war early in life and don't come back, never to have the opportunity to become ancestors.

If we were to honor our ancestors who suffered the loss of a child in service to their country, that would be a very different story.

Here's the follow-up to yesterday's post which featured the hot-button controversy over an image with an embedded swastika. If you watched the video, did you look closely at the contested picture?

BOLO—Be On the Look-Out for AI-generated images, video, and other content. It can be a fun puzzle; it's good practice training your brain to be more observant; and the skill may help protect you from propaganda.

Here's the image with the clandestine swastika, which was part of a comment posted on Matt Walsh's X feed, critical of his contention that many native-born South Africans are white. Now that I know about it, I can't unsee the symbol, and I did say I wasn't going to poke the bear unnecessarily, so I've blurred it out. You can see the original if you click on the picture.

This image freaks me out, and that has nothing to do with swastikas. It's creepy in the same way some of Salvador Dali's paintings are creepy.

Ignore the swastika; look at the girls. Six young girls, all dressed in white, so alike they could be sisters—or sextuplets. Look at their arms, their legs, the physically impossible contortion of their bodies, the arrangement of their dresses in ways no one would sit for an actual photograph (e.g. revealing their undergarments). Definitely creepy, and clearly AI-generated. As if someone had typed into an AI engine, "Create an image of six blonde white girls in which their dresses take the form of a swastika."

This is not a photo from reality. It is an image designed to cause trouble.

Surely someone else noticed this; I'm not going to waste my time wading through what others said. What interests me is that Matt Walsh's video does not indicate that he noticed it or thought it worth mentioning.

I find the use of Artificial Intelligence (Automated Idiocy) in this way disturbing. At root, AI is a tool, like a knife. It matters whether the knife is in the hands of a chef, a surgeon, or a psychopath.

I don't follow Matt Walsh's podcasts, but that's for lack of time, not lack of respect. I find him intelligent and well-spoken, and sometimes quote him here. Not that I always agree with him—he nearly lost me when I found out that he thinks raw milk is disgusting. I was almost one of the 14,000+ people who called him out on that, but decided instead that each of us has a right to be wrong, and let him alone.   

Why have I included him in my Heroes category? Because we need heroes at every level. Maybe Matt Walsh didn't run into a burning building to save a child, but he just took an important stand against the undefined but powerful mob that will use any excuse and any tactic to bring down those who dare disagree with whatever narrative they are currently imposing. I have no problem with calling someone out for saying or doing something that troubles me, but the demand for an apology and public groveling, which is almost always a part of the process, is not only wrong, but a dangerous abuse of power.

I consider it a heroic act to stand up to that kind of pressure. It's not easy. I remember, with shame, the times in my life when I've apologized for things I still believe were not only not wrong, but actively the right thing to do. And yet, shameful though I think my groveling was, I'm not apologizing for apologizing under duress, because the threats were not to me but to my children. The memory, however, makes me all the more inclined to respect people who, as Walsh put it, decline to take part.

In this video, Walsh addresses the firestorm that erupted when he refused to take down an image that someone else posted in a critical response to one of his X posts. Walsh, the mob insists, knowingly and approvingly posted a swastika, because he didn't censor his critic's image.

Now that I know where it is, I find it impossible not to see the swastika in question. But until it was pointed out, I didn't see it at all. I have no problem believing that Walsh didn't either. But once noted, why not take it down? The better question is, why should it be taken down? Even if it had been in plain sight, a normal swastika, while it would have been fine for Walsh to delete an image that someone else had imposed on his X feed, it is wrong for anyone to pressure him to do so. The swastika has been around for millennia and originally meant well-being. This mob would have had us burn our antique Oriental rug because it included these ancient symbols in its design.

Just because someone has reused a historic symbol for other purposes, that doesn't mean it's right to cave in to the misappropriation. Even if I'm the last person in the world to do so, I will still use "gay" to mean "lighthearted," use masculine pronouns as neutral when appropriate, and continue to cringe every time I hear "they" and "them" used as if they were singular. (This means I am cringing frequently while listening to the lastest New International Version of the Bible—not a salubrious situation.) I also insist on singing the old words to familiar hymns rather than the abominations featured in modern hymnals. Take that, "Good Christian Friends, Rejoice!"

This attack on Walsh makes me want to post an image of a swastika loud and clear on my blog, maybe in the company of my nasty-looking image of the COVID-19 virus. However, even if it may sometimes be necessary to fight a bear, it's stupid to poke one unnecessarily, so my more rational side beat down my gut reaction in this case.

The really interesting part of all this is the image itself—which I reserve for a subsequent post. I'll try enabling comments, just in case someone else notices the issue with the picture before I write about it. Please be respectful and refrain from using the comment section for arguments.

What you do matters. Answer the note. Respond to the email. Return the call.

I have no idea why these words from my friend Eric Schultz showed up recently in my feed reader, as their context is from 2020—but they're as important today as they were then. They're from his Occasional CEO article, "Answer the Note: Lessons from Ben & Jerry's and Warren Buffett," in which he demonstrates the power of simple acts to change lives. I would be remiss in not adding that Eric lives his own advice.

The simplest act of kindness can be transformational. And, if you are especially lucky, you will never even know the good you have done.

I hope you don't have to be on Facebook to see this very short clip of the challenge Jordan Peterson gave to ChatGPT.

I said, "Write me an essay that's a 13th rule for Beyond Order [one of Peterson's books], written in a style that combines the King James Bible with the Tao Te Ching." That's pretty difficult to pull off.... It wrote it in about three seconds, it's four pages long, and it isn't obvious to me ... that I would be able to tell that I didn't write it.

As the man said, "Hang onto your hats."

Florida has become the second state (after Utah) to ban the addition of fluoride to community water systems, for which I am very grateful. I prefer to have governmental decisions made at the lowest practical level, but I prefer even more not to have to choose between buying bottled water and drinking tap water with greater-than-natural levels of fluoride. I already get plenty, perhaps too much, from other sources, from toothpaste to topical fluoride to my frequent cups of tea. There may be dental benefits to consuming fluoride, but ingesting it ought to be a personal choice, not something forced upon all customers of the community water supply.

I let my opinion be known at the city level, with no success, despite the good examples of neighboring cities. So I was thrilled to learn yesterday that our legislature had passed, and Governor DeSantis signed, a bill eliminating added fluoride in our water systems.

There may have been a time when adding fluoride to the water supply was important, but with the substance so readily available in other ways, there's no excuse for forcing it on the general population.

Thanks, Florida!

Note that I'm not preaching to anyone but myself here—and maybe my runner husband who is still a few years short of 75.

The following is from an e-mail written by my father (emphsis mine). I don't think I'll ever be a runner, but I love walking; it's just hard to give it the time it deserves. The idea of self-care is popular these days, and most times I think I don't need any encouragement to think about myself more! But I'm trying to convince myself that paying attention to my health is actually a favor I'm doing to those around me on whom the burden of care would fall!

When I was at the Elderhostel program in the Smoky Mountains, one of the men—who was 75 years old—was telling me how he ran regularly. He wasn't particularly strenuous about it, but he ran for several miles either daily or every other day. When I said that my doctor would like for me to walk five miles a day, but I never found time, he asked "Is your health more important than the other things you have to do?"

Then he said that when he started running, his arthritis went away. When he stopped for a while it came back, and when he started again, it went away again.

Is it possible for that kind of activity to "cure" arthritis? My own feelings are that it might be quite possible. I have had a problem in my right foot for several years. When I start to walk on it, the foot is significantly painful, but the longer I walk, the less it bothers me. And in the Smokies, where I walked five miles a day for six days, the pain was gone and has only recently returned.

Still, the weather does not encourage five mile walks.

By "the weather," Dad was referring to ice-covered sidewalks and below-freezing temperatures. That's not my problem here in Florida, although summer days with temperatures in the mid-90's do make it tempting to avoid any kind of physical exertion.

I've been reading through our Constitution recently, a practice I recommend, along with reading the entire Bible on an annual basis. You never know what's going to jump out at you.

Here's a stark reminder of the dangers of getting our information from headlines, sound bites, click-bait, and quotations taken out of context.

There you have it.  Be a good citizen and vote accordingly.

Here's how to know when television has been too much a part of your life:

You read the headline, "1,000 Troops Who Identify as Transgender Being Discharged," and your first reaction is,

"Where was Donald Trump when Max Klinger needed him?"

Here are some more valuable thoughts from Hillsdale College's Imprimis magazine: New Thinking Needed on National Defense. There's no pay wall.

Please remember that I never agree with all of an author's ideas. That should be obvious but apparently isn't. When a problem is worth thinking about, it is inevitable that bad ideas will emerge. But we'll never get to the good ideas (or even recognize the bad ones) without casting a wide net. My goal is to stimulate thinking by presenting information I find interesting and/or helpful.

A smattering of semi-random quotes. Emphasis mine.

This raises the question of how we can spend so much on our national security but still have a military that seems so woefully underprepared for a major conflict.

[PGM=“precision guided munitions”] A key lesson of the Ukraine War is that when we deploy certain types of PGMs, such as anti-tank missiles or man-portable air-defense systems like Stinger missiles, it takes years to manufacture new ones. We have also learned that the tooling needed to produce various types of PGMs no longer exists—indeed, in some cases entire factories have been dismantled. This means that if we want more PGMs, we will have to start from scratch.

One of the key vulnerabilities of our defense and high-tech infrastructure is that the technology on which it relies is routinely stolen by foreign countries, especially China.... Despite various efforts to hinder or put a stop to this, cyber theft has become a huge business and is tremendously damaging to America’s national security. Until very recently, we have done virtually nothing about this cyber espionage. The thieves are almost never punished. All we do is complain while our enemies bleed us dry.

An important thing we learned very early on in the Ukraine War was that the incredibly expensive tanks we gave to the Ukrainians were defenseless against very inexpensive FPV drones. [In Yemen,] when the Iranian-backed Houthis started firing drones at ships in the Red Sea, what was the U.S. response? For each $30,000 Iranian drone we shot down, we employed two $2 million missiles.

Recently, by the way, forces on the ground in Ukraine have found that relatively inexpensive shotgun technology is proving more effective against drones than previously tried methods.

We need new thinking...about national defense. A guiding principle of that new thinking must be that the defense budget is not inexhaustible.

Why are people so upset that some government workers are losing their jobs? Why are we not rather rejoicing that vast areas of waste and downright corruption and fraud are being exposed? For as long as I can remember—and that's well more than half a century—governmental inefficiency and waste has been a standard joke. But it's not funny. It is unethical, and has led directly to our country's unimaginable debt, and the financial disaster we are bequeathing our children and grandchildren.

Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency are heroes in my book. Why is it that the same people who just months ago wanted to force us all to switch to electric cars are now so upset by the thought of layoffs that they think it's reasonable and useful to destroy Teslas?

It really stinks to lose your job. We've been there, more than once. But government employees have been living in a fantasy world of job security. Private companies, from small family businesses to massive corporations, frequently face situations where they must let employees go: sometimes when the workers have done something unethical, sometimes when they are not doing their jobs well, and often because cold, hard, economic facts force the business to downsize.

Where was all this weeping, wailing, and wrongdoing when American manufacturing went overseas? When our IT jobs went overseas? When millions of workers were imported to keep agricultural wages artificially low? When slave labor became acceptable because otherwise the plantation system would fall apart? (We once fought an especially grievous war over that one.) All these caused millions of American families to become unemployed or to settle for low-paying jobs without the benefits we once had. Did Americans then rise up in protest, or did we just sit back and enjoy the benefits of cheap goods?

It stinks to lose your job, but as far as I can tell, the government employees facing that threat have been offered generous severance packages, much nicer than what most people get when they find themselves out of a job. Why should governmental workers be protected from what ordinary Americans face daily?

Sadly, too many federal judges are showing that they are living in the same fantasy world, by ruling that the government cannot fire its own employees, reorganize its divisions, or effect layoffs of its own workers. What business could possibly stay afloat under such conditions? What part of the Constitution guarantees that a government employee, once hired, has a right to keep his job forever? I can only hope that higher courts have better sense—and that the errant judges are overruled before the damage done becomes irrevocable.

And what's wrong for an employee to be asked to give an accounting for the work he is doing? I admit I don't like the idea of cutting out remote work, which was a positive step forward for job satisfaction and family life. But remote work—or any work for that matter—can only succeed if the tasks actually get done, and I don't see why it's a bad thing to require some accounting of the work that justifies one's paycheck.

I don't remember where I heard the following, but it neatly expresses the problem.

I know a guy in the IT sector who says that a man slept at his desk regularly through the day, but they could not touch him, unless he really botched up. That is someone who is stealing from this company. He is stealing his wages for work not performed. 

That struck me in particular, because of a situation from my own experience. I also knew an IT guy who regularly fell asleep at his desk—or on the floor of his office. He was also one of the most treasured employees because he got the work done, and then some, without counting the hours. He was brilliant, and did his work in a manner that worked best for him. The company had no objection to his unusual schedule because they appreciated what he brought to the table.

I would like to see a system that facilitates such flexibility. Requiring a brief summary of the week's accomplishments can allow such people to shine.

Doubting that most of America's workforce is as obviously effective as my friend was, I believe we could all benefit from such an exercise. The psychological advantage of focusing on "what did I accomplish?" instead of "did I put in my hours?" could be great.

As a genealogist, I've read a lot of obituaries, and written a couple myself. I don't think I've ever published one for someone I wasn't related to, but Tucker Carlson's obituary for his father, which I copy here from his X post, deserves special mention.

I very much enjoy listening to Tucker's interviews, and if I hear only a small fraction of his output, that's the fault not of his work but of higher priorities calling on my time. He's a controversial figure, but whatever you think of him, the man can write. And speak. And interview the most interesting people.

This obituary is remarkable as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does. Not knowing any of the people involved, I can't attest to the accuracy of Tucker's depiction of his father, but his spare brush strokes paint a vivid picture of a man who accepted the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and yet lived his life in duty and delight.

Obituary for my father.

Richard Warner Carlson died at 84 on March 24, 2025 at home in Boca Grande, Florida after six weeks of illness. He refused all painkillers to the end and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his feet.

He was born February 10, 1941 at Massachusetts General Hospital to a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl and placed in the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston, where he developed rickets from malnutrition. His legs were bent for the rest of his life. After years in foster homes, he was placed with the Carlson family in Norwood, Mass. His adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12 and he stopped attending school regularly. At 17, he was jailed for car theft, thrown out of high school for the second time, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.

In 1962, in search of adventure, he drove to California. He spent a year as a merchant seaman on the SS Washington Bear, transporting cargo to ports in the Orient, and then became a reporter. Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period. He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles.

By 1975, he was married with two small boys, when his wife departed for Europe and didn’t return. He threw himself into raising his boys, whom he often brought with him on reporting trips. At home, he educated them during three-hour dinners on topics that ranged from the French Revolution to Bolshevik Russia, PG Wodehouse, the history of the American Indian and, always, the eternal and unchanging nature of people. He was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights. He left a library of thousands of books, most dog-eared and filled with marginalia. His reading and life experiences convinced him that God is real. He had an outlaw spirit tempered by decency.

In 1979, he married the love of his life, Patricia Swanson. They were together for 44 years, all of them happy. She died sixteen months before he did and he mourned her every day.

In 1985, he moved to Washington to work for the Reagan Administration. He spent five years as the director of the Voice of America, and then moved to the Seychelles as the US ambassador. In 1992, he became the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and later ran a division of King World television.

The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting. He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues. He knew a number of colorful national leaders, including Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, Aslan Abashidze of Adjara, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and whomever runs Somaliland. He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection.

He spoke to his sons every day and had lunch with them once a week for thirty years at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, always prefaced by a dice game. Throughout his life he fervently loved dogs.

Richard W. Carlson is survived by his sons, Tucker and Buckley, his beloved daughter-in-law Susie, and five grandchildren. He was the toughest human being anyone in his family ever knew, and also the kindest and most loyal. RIP.

It is easy to be heavy, hard to be light.
— G. K. Chesterton

Despite being six foot four and nearly 300 pounds himself, Chesterton wasn't talking about obesity. Here's the context of the quote.

When I began this post (in 2012!), it was intended to be ruminations on Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, which I reviewed briefly here. The quotations I pulled out in preparation are below; almost 13 years later, I'd have to re-read the book to make any sensible comments, so I'm just going to leave the quotes as is, without the ruminations.

Happiness, some people think, isn't a worthy goal; it's a trivial, American preoccupation, the product of too much money and too much television. They think that being happy shows a lack of values, and that being unhappy is a sign of depth.

Some people associate happiness with a lack of intellectual rigor.

Of course, it's cooler not to be happy. There's a goofiness to happiness, an innocence, a readiness to be pleased. Zest and enthusiasm take energy, humility, and engagement; taking refuge in irony, exercising destructive criticism, or assuming an air of philosophical ennui is less taxing.

Other people cultivate unhappiness as a way to control others. They cling to unhappiness because without it they'd forgo the special consideration that unhappiness secures: the claim to pity and attention.

The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It's more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.

There's yet another group of people who have a superstitious dread of admitting to happiness, for fear of tempting fate. Apparently, this is practically a universal human instinct and seen in nearly all cultures—the dread of invoking cosmic anger by calling attention to good fortune.

If you don't believe you're happy, you're not. As Publilius Syrus observed, "No man is happy who does not think himself so." If you think you're happy, you are. That's why [Saint] Thérèse [of Lisieux] said,"I take care to appear happy and especially to be so."

A prayer attributed to Saint Augustine of Hippo includes the line "shield your joyous ones" [the innocent and child-like]:

Tend your sick ones, O Lord Jesus Christ;
rest your weary ones; bless your dying ones;
sooth your suffering ones; pity your afflicted ones;
shield your joyous ones.
And all for your love's sake.

Episcopalians will recognize this from the Evening Prayer section in the Book of Common Prayer:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give thine angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for thy love’s sake. Amen.

Why worry about the joyous ones? ... We non-joyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we're sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion—to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it.

There's a lot of misery in the world: pain, fear, tragedy, and immeasurable suffering. That is all the more reason to seek, find, create, and celebrate happiness when we can. Let's not play the "more miserable than thou" game. Let's dare to be happy, and encourage the joy of others.

Okay, NOW it's funny. At the time I was not laughing.

The doorbell rang. Normally, I'm more cautious and look before opening the door, but I was expecting a friend and so threw the door open with a cheery greeting. Imagine my shock when faced with a young man selling pest control.

I do try to be polite, so I calmly reminded him of the "No Soliciting" signs at the neighborhood entrances. That's when things got weird.

"Oh, I'm not a prostitute; I'm merely selling pest control."

"Which is soliciting."

"No it's not. Look it up on Google. Soliciting is...."

At that point I exclaimed something loud and unintelligible and slammed the door.

Five minutes later I could laugh.

He didn't even have the excuse of English being his second language, as he had no trace of an accent. Possibly one could blame a failure of 12+ years of school.

But what it sounded like at the time was that he was being cheeky, that this was a practiced response for the many people in our neighborhood who inform solicitors—politely or rudely—of the warning signs they should have seen upon entering. (Unless, of course, they were dropped in by helicopter or parachute.)

Either that, or he had been coached in that response by whatever pimp sent him here.

I've always been open to cute little girls in Girl Scout uniforms selling Thin Mints, and to the earnest band members from our local public school who once a year sell apples as a fundraiser.  Perhaps, however, we should consider these to be gateway drugs. I try to be kind to door-to-door salesmen, because Porter had such a gig one summer during college, and I know that "pimp" is not too harsh a word for the adults who profit by sending the innocent into such situations. That's just sleazy.

I have to give the Jehovah's Witnesses credit: they've taken to setting up on public land just outside of the neighborhood instead of knocking on doors and disrupting people's Saturday mornings. They can read and follow the rules.

Maybe I should resurrect my COVID-era door sign:

This picture showed up on my Facebook page. It's from the Babylon Bee, which I often, though not always, find funny. I wouldn't have given this article more than a passing glance, were it not for the fact that less than 24 hours previously we had seen an excellent and amazing production, by our church's Resurrection Players, of Beetlejuice, Jr.

Trump Issues New Striped Robes For Federal Judges

If you've never seen the show, this won't make sense, but if you have, the association may provoke a smile unintended by the Bee.