Author Archive: Sarah Hoyt

GET GOVERNMENT OUT OF THE CHARITY BUSINESS AND LOWER TAXES: More importantly, make it socially acceptable for women to stay home and raise their own kids. Weirdly, that huge cost of having your child raised by strangers goes away. As does buying premade food and all the other stuff.  Impossible you say? Well, we somehow managed and kept up with our two-income families. And we only made the kind of money they talk about for one brief, shining year.  Escape Velocity: Why America’s 1963 Poverty Math Is Broken.

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE:  I’m The Beautiful But Evil Space Princess Who Rules A Galactic Empire But Really Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone!

Alice is the Imperial Princess Regnant of the Galactic Empire. At 22, she has been thrust into power after her father (the Emperor) and her two older brothers have all died in various ways. Her Imperial Chancellor, Lord Rupert, does everything he can to support her, but has somewhat different ideas about how the Empire should be run than did his late Emperor.

Alice has one major problem: She cannot be crowned Empress Regnant until she marries and produces an heir.

But Alice, being kept busy three days a week by interminable audiences with petitioners, and the rest of the week with what she terms “mostly busy work”, has no real way to meet young men — well, reasonably eligible young men, anyway, and of her own age — with whom she might eventually take up and form a household. And she chafes at the necessity of trying to rule, hands-on, an Empire so huge it cannot be truly ruled by any one person to begin with.

THIS CAUGHT MY ATTENTION AND MADE ME WONDER SOMETHING:  What we don’t know about mother’s milk. (It’s a TED talk)

What it made me wonder: apparently Mother’s Milk is not the same for everyone. It’s not a “formula” as is implicated by what we call artificial baby food, as though there were a single, scientific formulation.
America had problems with obesity and chronic illness earlier (the rest of the world has caught up about a generation later, tbf. It’s not super-visible yet because those people haven’t hit older years in numbers) and I wonder how much of it is because such a massive number of my generation was bottle fed by “scientifically designed” formula.  I don’t have the means or ability to test it, but it might be worth looking at.

AS SOMEONE WHO GREW UP IN EUROPE? AND STILL HAS FAMILY THERE?  EVERY WORD OF THIS. EVERY WORD:  Perceptions of Other Countries.