fix the problem with logging levels again, this time it should work to
make child log objects, and so on.  I was having strange warnings
when trying to grab a lock in __del__ during process shutdown, of the
for that NoneType wasn't callable.  I traced this to RLock.acquire()
but couldn't see much further into it. So I decided that on a __del__
to not try for locks.  I think this might actually be OK.  Or, it could
be that the lock was already deleted, or partially deleted?