Is 'Transgender Kids' Phenom meant to please Old 'Drag Queens?'

‘Transgender Kids’ are now, alas, a thing. Young kids are ‘diagnosed’ and given hormone blockers that will affect the rest of their life, and are told to look forward to surgery and life-long artificial hormone use.

Does this please the kids? Or their parents? Or does it please adult transgender, gender dysphoric and/or drag-queen type persons? Many of such adults did their ‘gender-transitioning’ in their mature years— age thirty or at least late twenties. Being past puberty, they may not make believable women or men, may feel they are not ‘pretty’ or ‘handsome’ enough, even if they are.

Most transgender adults, looking back at their childhoods, find attitudes and experiences that predict their future transgender selves. But are these perceptions factual, or the kind of thing we all do? I am, as an adult, a Catholic, Republican and a resident of a rural area. There are things in my childhood that may point to this— but other things that point the other way. Maybe my perception now is selective, because I now know how I turned out. And I certainly don’t believe that I am a Catholic Republican hick because I was ‘born that way.’

Objective scientific study needs to be done with the children who are being diagnosed as ‘transgender.’ If left alone, what percent will identify as transgender, and will it be a lifelong condition? What are the long-term consequences of giving children hormone blockers? But instead the transgender ‘experts’ are plunging right in and experimenting on children.

It’s true that if children aren’t given hormone blockers, and if they are transgender as adults, they won’t be as feminine or masculine looking as they would be otherwise. But what if a boy given hormone blockers starts identifying as a boy? What if that treatment makes him into a man who looks gender-ambiguous? 

I think it’s all about our culture’s fixation on being ‘pretty’ or ‘handsome.’ But good looks are not the main point of life. Good looks disappear with age, anyway. So what if that biological man in the Marilyn Monroe dress looks a tad less feminine than the real Marilyn Monroe? It’s just a sign that his body wasn’t messed with when he was too young to give informed consent. He may be quite pretty in his own, unique, born-a-man way. Maybe we have to learn to appreciate that.

Never say 'never' or 'always' about Gay or transgender persons

Even if you are a pro-family/pro-marriage activist in only the tiniest little way, you must be careful of the way you speak or write about Gay or transgender persons. Avoid extreme words like ‘never’ and ‘always’ the way you avoid calling your best friend a mother-effer. 

Examples are when you say Gay men ‘always’ have multiple casual sex partners even when they are ‘gay-married.’ Or that transgender persons ‘never’ understand when they are asked not to talk raunchy stuff in front of tiny children. 

You don’t know every Gay or transgender person on the planet, and the ones you do know, you don’t watch them 24 hours a day. You don’t know for sure what any one Gay or transgender person always or never does, much less what all Gay or transgender persons do. 

‘Always’ or ‘never’ statements are ‘always’ an extreme and ‘never’ truthful. Plus, they provoke anger without need.

It is better to say that ‘some’ or ‘many’ Gay men find underage teen boys attractive than to say ‘all’ Gay men ‘always’ do and ‘never’ show respect for the age-of-consent laws.

And when you do say these milder things, it is best to try to document them. If you can find some Gay leader speaking out for ‘open’ (non-faithful) marriage, then you can document that at least one leader of the Gay community has that opinion.

When the issue of transgender biological males going in to battered women’s shelters comes up, some conservatives have said they ‘only’ go into a battered women’s shelter to victimize the women.

The problem is that many transgender persons of both biological sexes have experienced abuse and violence and may need shelter. The only question is, where shall they go? Ideally there should be shelters available to meet the needs of many types of abuse victims. And, no, you can’t put a battered man in with battered women— it will scare some of the women when they need a less-scary place to recover. 

The first and best move for any of us when speaking out in a pro-family/pro-marriage way is to speak with compassion for those who are on the other side. And that means ‘never’ using words like ‘always,’ ‘never,’ and ‘all’ when some more restrictive phrase will communicate your meaning better. 

Even Primitive Farmers Need Grey Matter

Some guy

A certain elitist presidential candidate has made some waves in claiming that he— a non-farmer— could teach anyone to be a farmer since it doesn’t require any ‘grey matter’ (brains) to be a farmer, like it does to have a tech job. And farmers go on TV to say how wrong he is when it comes to modern farmers. But no one defends primitive farmers. And they needed brain power too.

Think of the primitive farmer working with crude hand tools. He had no weather satellites to give him advice on the ideal time to plant his crop. If he planted too early, he could lose it all. Too late, and not enough of the crop would be ready for harvest. He didn’t even have a farmer’s almanac or a calendar to go by! He needed to know the signs from nature that winter was really over and it was time to plant. Inexperienced or lazy farmers might not make enough of a crop to feed their family! Which was why young farmers worked with their fathers and grandfathers for years until they built up some experience of their own. 

Livestock farmers also needed brain power. Breeding to the best bull you could get was a good way to improve your herd— but not if your herd got so inbred to that one great bull that they were all half-sisters or cousins and you were getting a lot of undersized young animals because of the inbreeding. Livestock farmers with experience learned how to manage the breeding. They might use a less-than-great unrelated bull in the years after they had used a great bull of their own breeding as herd sire.

The primitive farming job that didn’t require brain power was not that of the farmer, but that of the farm laborer. The farmer would point his laborer at a field and instruct him to plow up the field, or plant barley in it, or hoe the weeds out of the crop, and the laborer would do it. The laborer didn’t need to know when the right time to plow or plant was. That was the farmer’s job. The laborer just did what he was told, and if he wasn’t a man blessed with a lot of brain power, he could still do the job.

Most lower-level modern tech jobs are like that. The boss tells you what to do and you do it. The only brain power you need is for finishing your high school or tech training classes because the boss won’t hire you without them. You often do not need to use your brains for anything, once you get hired, other than to keep your ears apart. 

A modern tech worker does not need much brain power on the job unless he gets a series of promotions and gets to tell other workers what to do. But he thinks he has brain power. He may be dim enough to be taken in by substandard political candidates that promise the moon but can’t deliver without wrecking the economy and losing the tech worker class their jobs, but he has been carefully convinced he is oh-so-smart because he votes for the fellow with the right— or left— letter after their name.

But highly intelligent persons— whether they are ancient farmers or modern computer programmers— are not important to the political process. There are just not enough of them to deliver the votes needed. So politicians must appeal to— or deceive— persons of lesser intelligence, and often do so by pretending those persons are smart. 

The LGBTwhatever Movement vs Your Family

A few years back I read something online that horrified me. A teenage boy who identified as ‘Gay’ told his parents that they needed to leave their Catholic faith, or they would no longer be his parents. How could parents deal with that? Would they make a show of leaving their faith, and sneak off to Confession or Mass when they thought their son would not know? Or would that demand create a long-term barrier to the parent-child relationship?

When the LGBTxyz movement leads its victims to think it’s OK to make threats to withdraw from family relationships to browbeat a family member into changing their religion or politics, they are risking that those victims will be cut off from their families— their emotional support system. But somehow the LGBTxyz folks just keep on doing things like that— because they have more power when individual ‘Gay’ people are socially isolated from those outside the ‘Gay’ community, and are more dependent on ‘Gay’ institutions and the Movement.

As a person with Same-Sex Attraction, I guess I don’t like the LGBT movement enough. Before my birth, it wasn’t the LGBT movement that was in labor for hours to bring me into the world. My mom did that. It wasn’t the LGBT movement that worked for hours and hours daily to earn the money to provide for my needs and wants. My dad did that. When persons with Same-Sex Attraction are faced with hard times or the loss of a love or homelessness or depression, is the LGBT movement going to run to their houses to hold their hands, or are their family members going to do that. 

Of course, families can be imperfect— even actually abusive in some cases. And even non-abusive families can disapprove of a child’s promiscuous ‘Gay’ or straight lifestyle or drug use or alcoholism, and the child involved can get mad about that or disagree or want to get parental and family approval for all of their actions up to and including felonies. But for most of us, its the members of our families that we rely upon for emotional support and practical help in tough situations— even if those family members can’t be persuaded to march in a ‘Pride’ parade for your sake.

But the LGBT movement like other political movements is about power, and your healthy, strong family is a threat to that power. If you spend a lot of your time interacting with your parents and family members, you have less time to directly support LGBT activism by showing up at protests or kicking money in to their organizations. But if you sacrifice your family relationships for the LGBT movement’s sake, there is a void in your life that an impersonal far-off Movement cannot fill. 

Twitter Rewards & Punishes Incivility

Do you use Twitter? Have you ever wanted to have a post go viral? Being unkind is probably the way to go. The most ‘viral’ thing I’ve ever done on Twitter was to make a non-supportive comment on Bernie Sanders’ tweet. I got so much flak from that I had to change my settings! And I wasn’t even rude or nasty or anything. It’s just that Sanders’ fans don’t appreciate anything other than Sanders-worship.

Tired old ex-celebrities have found their tweets unignored when they venture forth with unhinged comments about how Pres. Trump’s children ought to be murdered. As long as they are progressive ex-celebrities they will probably not have their Twitter account suspended. (If they did, they’d just make a new Twitter account and continue as before.)

Personally, I don’t see why anyone should call Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama or Donald Trump a POS when you can just say ‘bless his heart!’ and mean more or less the same thing. We live in a world full of unhinged people. Civility is a safety measure.

But if you are regularly uncivil in your Twitter life, and if you are some flavor of conservative or Republican, and you are NOT Donald Trump, the Twitter gods are likely to punish you. You may lose your account or be ‘shadowbanned’ or, as I have recently heard, you may find yourself following someone/something you would never follow voluntarily. I have seen this happen to people I know who are kind, decent people— people I would turn to for help if reconstituted Nazis were hunting me. 

Since neither the progressive nor the conservative movements are monolithic entities where everyone thinks the same, I’m sure there are progressives who have been persecuted by Twitter for not saying the right— or Left— things. In fact, I’m sure there are those in the Twitter beast that are madder at the deviant progressives than they would ever be at we mere conservative ‘haters.’ 

So what is a tweeter to do? If we are too polite, our tweets will be ignored and disappear into silence. We will lose our chance to be of influence. But if we are ‘spicy,’ even if in a mostly civil way, we’ll be guilty of hate speech, deplatformed and silenced. Sometimes our words will be grossly misinterpreted in order to make us guilty. 

I have no answers, other than to be flexible. Don’t put all your internet ‘eggs’ into one Twitter or Facebook basket. Have a blog, have a Gab or MeWe account, try something different. Spread your effort out in more than one place. It’s highly unlikely you will be suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Gab and MeWe at the same time, and also have your blog taken down. And if you blog— consider compiling some of your more ‘evergreen’ blog posts into an ebook on Smashwords, or even a printed book. Banning a book is harder than taking down a Twitter account or a blog.

Amazon-dot-com really is out to get us

I’ve been a customer of Amazon-dot-com for some years now, and I tend not to think of them as promoters of book censorship. After all, early on I got my copy of ‘The Turner Diaries,’ a once-talked-about badly written white supremacist, antisemitic book about a future race war, from Amazon.

But in more recent times I’ve heard stories of censorship at Amazon.  There were stories they were going to start banning or shadow-banning books with ‘keto’ in the title, because the keto world is full of cholesterol-deniers  who believe scientific research rather than ‘fats are bad’ bleating.

I also have heard a report that the works by the founder of ‘conversion therapy’ had been pulled from Amazon because the LGBT leadership feel these books conflicted with their dogmas.

The Aquila Report: Amazon Bans Books on "Conversion Therapy"

But now, Amazon has pulled some e-books by Christian authors I happen to know personally, Declan Finn and Jon Del Arroz. I have read their previous books and named kittens after both men. OK, one kitten is named Declanna and the other is Jon-with-Rice, but still.

Both books were in the pre-ordering stage and both authors have lost the pre-orders they had for the ebook edition. In both cases, the more expensive paper-based versions of the books were still available. 

Evidently Amazon is claiming that the authors took the books down for revision (a lie) or that the publisher did something (also a lie.) I wonder if their plan is mainly to persuade certain non-progressive authors that Amazon is not their friend and they should boycott and make it harder for themselves to get their books out with alternatives to Amazon. 

The thing about Amazon is that they are out to make money. They probably believe they will make more money by giving in to complaints by the Progressive special-snowflake types, than standing strong against all censorship. But the more they cater to the special-snowflake, safe-space, pro-censorship crowd, the further they will have to go. Someday they may need to start taking down books and movies that earn them good money to prevent an expensive boycott from the Left.

What can YOU do? Buying Declan Finn and Jon Del Arroz’s books are a good start. It is also good, when you hear of a case of this type, to transmit it throughout your social media— tweet, Facebook, MeWe, Gab, whatever you’ve got. Blog about it. Because this kind of progressive sh-t only works when they can keep us in the dark.

PajamasMedia: Amazon Bans Christian Novels Glorified and Deus Vult

John C. Wright: Declan Finn Encounters Rough Waters on Amazon....

Bounding Into Comics: Amazon Removes Two Christian Fiction Books

Rawle Nyanzi: Why #BrandZero Matters

Jim McCoy: Stop With The Discrimination

Congresscritters shalt not commit adultery

Among the many things that Congresscritters, male and female, ought not to do, adultery is high on the list. Even if you call it ‘open marriage’ or ‘polyfidelity’ or violate the terms and conditions of the English language by using the non-word ‘thruple.’ 

Why? Congressing is a job in which you are expected to swear an oath of office. Swearing a solemn oath is a big hairy deal! Throughout much of history folks worried if they swore a solemn oath and failed to keep it, they could expect some hellfire in their long-term future. They didn’t feel entitled to shrug their oathbreaking off with the insincere words ‘well, I tried.’ 

And marriage? It’s not a government benefits program for sex partners no matter how much some people want it to be. It is a covenant— another solemn oath you are expected to keep. The institution of marriage is also a major building block of any society. Marriage traditionally creates a home with a man and a woman at the center of it. Scientific studies have shown that these marriage-based homes provide a beneficial environment for the raising of children. Just look at children who have been raised in orphanages and the foster care system, and you will see there is no substitute. 

Now, when you are selecting a candidate to vote into Congress, you want someone who is going to take his oath of office seriously. And one hint is to see how well he has kept the other solemn oaths in his life. A person who is on record as having committed adultery, just like a person who has been convicted of perjury, is usually not a good choice.

Former congresswoman Katie Hill has been mislead by our sick society into thinking that the word ‘polyfidelity’ somehow makes adultery OK and gets her permission not to keep her marriage oath. She also thinks accusations of ‘abuse’ make her misdeeds all right. She is wrong, and that makes her resignation the right thing to do, but I’m afraid she will never know it and will think of herself as an innocent victim. 

Now, there have been even presidents of our country who are believed to have committed adultery while in office— the business with JFK and Marilyn Monroe being one example. Does that mean we should have rejected JFK from being our president (had we known?) No, we are allowed to forgive presidential (and congressional) sins. But it is far better when our nation’s leaders have the morals and the dignity to avoid adultery and other major violations of moral law. 

Marriage is the heart of our society— it’s where are most competent members of society are raised. Adultery, in the German language, is called ‘Ehebruch’ or marriage-breaking. Perhaps that’s where we get our concept of the ‘broken home—‘ a home which is destroyed by an annulment or divorce, which is in turn often triggered by adultery or suspicions of adultery. When a marriage is broken by adultery, a light goes out in our society. When enough lights go out, we have violence in the street and filled prisons because of all of the young people who come from ‘broken homes’ and don’t have the moral foundation or mental health to become contributing members of our society. 

Some people look down their noses at the ‘prudes’ who don’t want known adulterers elected or appointed into positions of power. ‘We should pick the best guys regardless of their private life,’ they say. But are they the best guys if they are adulterers? Or perjurers, thieves, bank robbers or serial killers? Would you vote a Jeffrey Dahmer into congress if he had good skills, or would you hold out for someone who had the moral values to at least not kill people?

Katie Hill says 'this isn't over' despite resigning over sex scandal

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They're Out to Get the Children!

They are out to get the children. No, not the zombies. The progressives. It’s a simple matter of math. As long as the progressives have not yet managed to replace our ‘two-party system’ with a one-party tyranny, they have to manage to get 51% in some election to even have their guy in Congress. 

But progressives have one major obstacle in gaining future votes: they have much more fully embraced ‘birth control mentality’ and abortion culture than the conservatives. As a result, conservatives have larger families. Progressives may not have children at all. Global warming, you know? Children are a form of pollution, like carbon. Progressives may pride themselves on being more environmentally friendly, but by giving up children they are giving up the chance at having a captive audience in their home to recruit to the cause. 

And so they turn to the public schools, and, through laws and lawsuits, they exercise some controls over private Catholic, Lutheran and other Christian schools as well. Overwhelmingly, people who want to become public school teachers are required to join a liberal teachers union that uses union dues from members to support progressive political candidates. In the states where teachers do have a legal alternative to joining the union, they are certainly not told about that fact routinely and it is not made easy. In some cases, they have to pay union dues anyway. 

Teachers’ unions provide access to the teachers for indoctrination purposes, if they haven’t already been indoctrinated enough by their schools and colleges. The result? In stories throughout the nation, for decades now, we hear that children who express support for Republicans are viciously bullied— by the teachers as well as other students. While children who express progressive views, even contradictory stupid ones, are praised.

Biased rules of ‘diversity’ support help promote the progressive atmosphere. Kids who come out as LGBT-whatever are rewarded by having ‘Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs.’ Christian kids don’t get to form ‘hateful’ Man-Woman Marriage Support Clubs, they are lucky if they are not forbidden to wear crucifixes or crosses to school. Because they are haters, see?

Many years ago, I was a teacher in a Lutheran school. Because the parents had to pay tuition, every single parent thought he was in charge. One parent would want zero homework for the younger kids, another wanted more homework for these same kids. Some parents wanted Lutheran religious instruction, others wanted generic Protestants. We as teachers had to try to make everyone happy.

Progressive public school teachers don’t think like that. I’ve heard of a case where the teacher inspected a child’s lunch from home, deemed it nutritionally inferior, and forced the child to pay for an (institutionalized processed food) school lunch. Because teachers have more rights than parents in that area, in progressive teachers minds. Parents are the problem. 

More recently there are cases where teachers have ‘diagnosed’ a child as ‘transgender’ and demanded that the parents take the child to a pro-gender-transition ‘therapist’ or be prosecuted for child abuse. 

In California there was several years ago a requirement that all schools teach ‘LGBT history,’ which I suppose means that to California kids Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickenson are Gay now. Whether Abraham and Emily like it or not. Children need LGBT history whether it’s true or not!

Once children get fully indoctrinated by progressive schools, we know what party they are going to be casting their first ballots for. Some of these young voters will, in time and with exposure to the real world, become mentally free to consider both sides of some issues. But in the meantime they will be voting the way progressive teachers have programmed them to.

I think that we conservatives should not just lie down and take it. A few families homeschooling is not enough. Why are there not funds in every single American city and town, so that every family who wants to send a child to a conservative Christian school can get a scholarship to do so? We can’t wait for school voucher programs to magically appear and magically be fair even to ‘hateful’ conservative schools. As long as Big Government holds the purse strings to schools and school vouchers, education of children will be a political football. And I hate football. We need to opt out— not just for our own kids if we are lucky enough to be in two-parent families, but for other kids as well. Government schooling is becoming an increasing threat to the democratic process. Let’s seek alternatives.

Why College Education Can't Be 'Free'

College students who are too dim to make it in college are demanding that college educations should be ‘free.’ What they really mean is that THEY don’t want to pay for it. They just want the benefits if they actually manage to get themselves educated, or get a degree in spite of their cluelessness.

Colleges and universities have a staff— professors and others— and buildings in which to hold classes. Both these things cost money that someone will have to pay for. Yes, we COULD enslave all college professors and make them teach for free, but we’d still have to feed them, because their deaths by starvation would inhibit their teaching ability. Feeding our nation’s college professor slaves would cost us money. We’d also need to house them in some manner nice enough they won’t all run away from the educational plantation and leave the college students untaught. 

Because of the costs, what ‘free education’ usually means is that those few students who pass the entrance exams with flying colors will get the educations. The students who today can enter classrooms based on student loans (which have to be paid back) would have no shot at higher education. This would actually be good for the dim bulbs who could never have graduated anyway, since they would have no loans to pay back.  But the others— the ones who are not epic test-takers but who could have managed to learn and graduate anyway— would have no opportunities.

Another approach to ‘free education’ is what happens in our public high schools, especially in poor neighborhoods. The standards are lowered, classes dumbed down, and before long you see high school diplomas handed out even to kids who can’t even read the words on the diploma. That’s a major reason that college is so important for people who want a job— high school diplomas now mean nothing. College diplomas are going the same way. 

I’ve heard someone express admiration for some foreign country in which ‘anyone’ can get government funding to live on while they go to university. But they never ask how many applicants can get into the colleges, how many places there are available compared to the number of high school leavers who don’t have jobs yet and might look at government funded studying as an alternative to getting a job. I doubt any country with ‘free education’ can afford to give it out to all comers. Someone has to get jobs to pay the bills.

As college degrees become worth less and less, it’s interesting that some are pointing out the shortage of young persons willing to train to become plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and other skilled non-college jobs. I guess the work is just too hard, compared with going to a college for years, majoring in binge drinking, and hope Bernie Sanders will magically pay off everyone’s student loans without collapsing the economy too badly. 

Why Bloggers should Compose Posts on Scrivener

Scrivener? You may be saying. Isn’t that just for novelists and book writers? Why should I use that— pay money for that— when I am just a blogger?

OK, that’s another problem. If you blog, and your blog has more than just pictures or videos— if there are words— You Are a Writer. You may be an unpaid writer, and you may be so insecure that you haven’t adopted the identity of ‘writer’ yet— or you just add ‘not a REAL writer’ — but you are a writer. Deal with it.

Scrivener is a tool that writers use to write their work. You start a Scrivener ‘project’ and you can make any number of folders for chapters and divisions of your work, and under the chapters you have pages called ‘text’ which are often used for the scenes of a fiction chapter.

I use it for my blog. I no longer compose my blog posts while online, using the ‘new post’ thing on my blog. I have a Scrivener project for blogging. I have folders for my individual blogs— there are a few active blogs— and sub-folders for the date range.

Why do I do that? Several reasons. The main one is that blogging is insecure. My very first blog, before I started my Blogger account, was on a blogging service which no longer exists. I’ve had more than one blog on services that no longer exist. Since I have my back blog posts preserved on Scrivener now, if my whole blog went down I could re-create it somewhere else.

I’ve been having a bit of a time with Blogger since I moved my blogging efforts back to that service. I’m wondering how committed Google is to blogger. I’ve been having troubles commenting on other Blogger blogs. Google could discontinue Blogger or turn it into a paid service at any time. 

Also, I’ve heard, also about Blogger, that people have had their whole blog taken down for no reason, by mistake. It’s never happened to anyone I know of, but it could happen. If it happened to me, I wouldn’t lose my posts.

Finally, bloggers are WRITERS. After you have been blogging for a while, you may have enough posts on a certain topic to gather those posts together, make a new Kindle project for them, add more material, and publish it as an e-book or a printed book. 

The down side of Scrivener is that it does cost a little money. Once you have it and get used to using it, you won’t want to do without it. Now, before I first bought Scrivener I downloaded a free Scrivener alternative called YWRiter. That would work to preserve your blog posts as well.

Is Your KJV Bible Missing Bits?

Writers of all kinds who are culturally literate have most often either read the Bible or at least read books in which phrases from the Bible are quoted. It’s part of being an educated person. 

But as you probably aren’t willing to learn Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek to read the Bible in the original, you will need a translation. And the long-time reigning king of English language Bible translations is the King James Version, called the KJV for short. 

The KJV was also the Bible authorized to be read in Anglican churches in England back in the days you couldn’t safely be anything BUT Anglican in England. So another name for it is Authorized Version, also AV. 

There is a dispute between Catholics and most Protestants, and between the ancient Jews who translated the Septuagint, an ancient Greek-language Bible, and medieval and modern Jews, over which books belong in the Bible. The dispute is over some books that are called Deuterocanonicals or Apocrypha, depending on which side of the dispute you are on. 

These books were included when the first Christian Bible, with both a New Testament and an Old Testament, was compiled. At the time of the Reformation when Protestantism was invented, ‘Reformers’ such as Luther and Calvin grumbled about the Deuterocanonical books. 

But Luther translated them into his German Bible translation all the same, and the King James translators did also. They were only removed later, by the British Bible Society, perhaps because not believing those books belonged in the Bible made it cheaper to print Bibles.

But those parts of the KJV were known for a long time in England, and a lot of the writers we are taught to think of as ‘great’ grew up having these ‘extra’ Bible books read to them at church and at chapel in their schools. 

The missing KJV books are available in a separate volume called ‘The Apocrypha KJV,’ which I used for years until I got a really nice leather-bound complete KJV. There are also paperback KJV Bibles with Apocrypha.

The thing that writers, particularly, need to know about Bible translations is that all the newer, trendier Bible translations are copyrighted works, and you need permission to quote from them. 

For indie writers and bloggers, though, it may be too hard to get permission, especially if all you want to do is quote one little thing. The KJV Bible, being old, may be freely quoted. 

I personally prefer the KJV because I grew up Protestant reading the KJV, and did not become Catholic until much later in my life. Most of my Bible knowledge came from the KJV, and I prefer it. I couldn’t imagine using a modern version for memorizing a Bible verse, for example.

For the English-speaking writer who does not have a religious preference, the KJV has been the version with the most literary influence. The old-fashioned language of the KJV strengthens your command of the English language, and prepares you to read Shakespearian English. 

To learn more about the history of the ‘missing’ books of the KJV Bible, read ‘Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger’ by Gary G. Michuta.

Why Folks don't Neuter their Barn Cats

Some people think that you should treat barn cats like they are the elderly, overweight indoor cats we are supposed to have, and neuter them in kittenhood. If you are an Animal Rights advocate who believes that all domestic animals should go extinct, you are probably angry— if only those darn people would have neutered all their cats long ago, they’d be extinct already.

People who have barn cats don’t think like that. A barn cat colony usually has a lot of unaltered cats. In the case of the female cats, motherhood makes them more interested in hunting. Even after the kittens have grown up, even if the mama cat is later spayed, they still think they are hunting for a family of 4 or more. Girl kitties who get spayed before motherhood are more likely to get fat and do like my cat Mariska does— imitate a furry, fat rug 23 hours a day.

With male cats there is a different situation. Intact males serve a leadership and protective function in many breeds of animals. Some people who keep free-ranging laying hens also have a rooster to warn of danger and to lead the hens back to the henhouse at night.

With cats, the most dominant tomcat rules the roost. Or at least, he bosses the other male cats, neutered and not-neutered. I have had a problem with my current Head Tomcat, Derek, chasing off male kittens once they start getting all masculine. As a result, I’ve neutered some of the male kittens that are affectionate and that I would miss if they get chased off the property. The two kittens, George M. and Sonny, did get big weight-wise, but not actually obese. They retained their sweet nature and Derek gets along with them, since they are not rivals.

The previous Head Tomcat in Charge was called Little Stranger. He got the name since I found him as a newborn in the long grass, and since I couldn’t find the guilty mama I added him to the litter of a cat who’d just had 5 girl kittens. She was too tired to notice the addition.

Little Stranger killed a favorite kitten in the middle of the night one night. This is an instinctual act some tomcats perpetrate to get the lady cats to come back in heat quicker. I ‘punished’ Little Stranger by making the appointment to neuter him the next morning. After he got neutered, I kept him in the house for a while so he wouldn’t smell like a tomcat to Derek and get chased off. Little Stranger stayed lean after his decommissioning as a tomcat. He’s adjusted to his lower status in the cat herd, but he keeps telling me he could have been a contender.

Some people say that an unspayed queen cat will have about a thousand descendants in a year or so. In real life, that is not so. My barn cat colony mostly produces enough kittens to make up for the old cats who have died and the occasional cat that wanders off or gets eaten by coyotes or foxes. I used to allow my barn cat queens to have their babies in the barn, with the result that some kittens grew up without human contact and were feral. 

I didn’t like that. I used to give away some kittens regularly, and they need to be tame for that. My barn cats have a cat door so they can come in to the back porch and go to the basement. I encourage them to have their kittens on the porch, and some obviously pregnant mama cats get to come into the house to raise their babies. (It’s a farmhouse, there are plenty of mice for mama cats to hunt without going outdoors.)

My mama cats have varying amounts of kittens. A couple regularly have one-kitten litters. One, Connie, likes to have 2 litters of 5 or 6 kittens every year, but hers tend to be small and not thrive. Some people think I should give all my cats away to the Humane Society (which charges for abandoning a pet) so that they can all be put to sleep, since some of my kittens die, but that is absurd. Some of every kind of animal die young. My goats, when I had them, never had a 100% survival rate of their kids. The same with my sheep. Chicks and ducklings I raise don’t ALL grow up to be big chickens or ducks. 

The purpose of having barn cats is to kill the vermin. Barns attract vermin, especially rats and mice. Just being in a rural area attracts mice— I have tons moving in the house every fall. Last year I even had a mouse living in my mailbox. The trick with barn cats is this: never scold one for killing things, or bringing dead stuff to you, or eating a baby bunny rabbit right in front of you. Don’t even kvetch when they kill a baby chick! It’s YOUR job to protect the critters you don’t want eaten from your barn cats.