Good News for Some Seniors

So, two weeks ago someone paid for a blog post I have yet to do, while I've been working with e-friends on books. This morning by way of a prod someone paid for two more posts. The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is still moving forward but its schedule is changing. It's time to give the nice person the post already. This post is about some relatives of the sponsor, who are of course more distant relatives of mine (this being Gate City), and about other elderly relatives across North America.

Ten years of glyphosate insanity have given many non-celiacs an insight into the celiac experience. It's hard to describe this experience within the terms of this web site's contract, but this web site will try. These days many people know they're celiacs because their celiac relatives had their blood tested when they were children, but for a long time, the way people knew they were celiacs was the specific scary symptom known as celiac sprue. Sprue, a word most often used to describe the similar effects of a tropical bacterial infection with similar symptoms, is a frothy diarrhea and/or vomit that looks a bit like chocolate mousse, only streaked with blood and flecked with particles of undigested food.

Celiacs usually have had years of experience with their "spastic colons" before developing sprue, and usually manage to suffer discreetly. Most of the sprue in North America lands in toilets or "leaks" into Depends, or other brands of padded plastic-lined pants. People with unexpected glyphosate reactions don't always realize what's going on, which accounts for a mess I saw beside the road on the way in on Tuesday morning.

When young people have this symptom, what leaps to mind is probably cancer. When older people have it, what leaps to mind is "Not able to take care of self. Not fit to be in 'nice' retirement project." Or, if you've watched Roseanne Barr's classic movie She-Devil...



"Incontinence!"

Sometimes it's obvious that loss of bowel or bladder control is one of the things that wear out all at the same time as an aging body really does shut down and stop living. Some people grow old and die that way.

Then again, sometimes even at age eighty or ninety a person is fully conscious, has some ability to walk, and yet loses control of per excretory functions in the same way and for the same reasons a young person might.

During our conscious lifetimes most of us have episodes of incontinence, sometimes accompanied by loss of mobility. Some of these episodes are alcohol-induced; others are known as Norwalk Flu.

Others are glyphosate reactions, and although these reactions may threaten to become chronic, the good news is that people recover from them. Usually recovery begins as soon as the level of glyphosate inside the body drops below the individual's threshold level--typically about the time the poisoned food is flushed away.

During the week I talked to a couple of people from the local retirement projects. They were talking about how sick their neighbors in the projects have been, about which ones were helping which other ones scrub messes off the floors--mercifully, the projects have hard tile floors that don't show bleach spots.

These are the people for whom do-gooders have been snapping up all those cans of corn and boxes of cereal at must-sell prices, because people who wanted to buy canned corn and cereal at the regular price had already noticed that it made them sick. "Well, it's outdated food." Yes, and it was unfit for consumption by any living creature before it was outdated, too; that's why.

I read that a clueless young singer is dedicating a concert to "farmers," raising money to donate masses of unsalable glyphosate-poisoned and probably genetically modified grain to "hunger relief." Ooohhh. And the people buying tickets to that concert think they don't believe in punishing welfare cheats by measures like one I've often proposed--oh how mean I am!--of requiring welfare recipients to spend 40 hours each week on a day labor site. Some of the people who spend their cash on drugs, by choice or necessity, and tell food bank volunteers that they're hungry, are in for torture. Could they but know what knots their insides are about to tie themselves into, if they had the choice, they'd beg to be sent to that day labor site!

During the week I was also reminded of the time a friend's father moved into a retirement project, had a minor accident during the night, and was caught bleaching a spot in the morning. On his first full day in his new flat he was told to move, or be moved into a nursing home, that day. My husband and I had just moved into a house the seller had fitted with brand-new wool carpeting, and were enjoying the downstairs rooms, ourselves--it was still hot enough that a computer wouldn't run in the upstairs office; but my husband was a bit indignant that I'd even asked him before inviting the friend's father to move into our downstairs bedroom. The way we were brought up, you don't let your elders, or your friends' elders, be put in nursing homes.

Instead, of course, you Care (it really ought to have a capital C): You move into their house if possible, or they move into yours if necessary, so you can be no more than one room away from them at all times. You wheel them to the bathroom if possible, or haul bedpans back and forth. You wash the sheets, and the quilts that go between the sheets and the rubber mattress cover, during the times when you're not walking behind the person to make sure person doesn't fall, or otherwise doing the person's bidding. You get up in the middle of the night. You make the care of this person's dying body the focus of your life. Whether or not the person knows you're there, or has any idea who you are: no lucid moment when the person might have a message of love, pardon, or forgiveness to leave should ever be lost.

The first year or two I lived in the house now known to cyberspace as the Cat Sanctuary, my mother was showing me how this is done. Oh, what a...it was sixteen months actually. Grandmother was a Perfect Southern Lady and a heroine. Mother was not, strictly speaking, Southern but she was also a heroine. They were very, very polite to each other and usually didn't dump their real feelings on my brother, Dad, or me. I was a skinny, sickly, undiagnosed celiac child but that was the year I was skinniest and sickliest.

It was a relief, later, that Dad was one of the older people who don't actually want that much of a time and energy commitment from their children. Some people don't. All blind people spill things on floors and Dad didn't mind his daughters mopping his floors, but when his bed needed cleaning he shouted through the door, "Go away. No females allowed here! Your Cousin John Doe can come in if he wants to."

There's actually a wide range of opinions about family care. Some people like to be visited by all their young relatives, but fret about some of their relatives not being big and strong enough to catch them if they started to fall. Some don't mind being cleaned and dressed by a same-sex relative, but would give themselves heart attacks from pure humiliation if they were cleaned or dressed by an opposite-sex relative. Some would feel mortified if they had to be cleaned or dressed by any of their own children. Some want to spend their last days with one "special" heir. Some want to draw up a rota where all their younger relatives, roughly in proportion to the degree of kinship, spend some time with them during every week.

And some people really do want to be allowed to die, when they've stopped living, without any particular effort to keep their hearts beating longer. Some people feel very strongly about this. Sara Teasdale, among others, loathed the thought of being helpless and useless so much that she committed suicide when, according to doctors, she was probably in no danger of any permanent disability.

Is it, as writers like Stephen King and Jacquelyn Mitchard have postulated in fiction, the last act of filial devotion to help a dying parent commit suicide? I hope not. But it may be the last act of filial devotion to witness all those heartbreaking documents people find it necessary to write, rewrite, and videotape, affirming that they don't want their bodies artificially prevented from dying when their minds are ready to go.

So, suppose you are (somebody I know). You have a grumpy old relative who replies to all hints about home sharing with "I'm only seventy-five, I might have an overnight date." He likes being alone in a big empty house. He seems to be living on cheap greasy meat, Coca-Cola in the morning, and beer in the evening. You try to leave healthier things, like those crisp and juicy summer apples, at his house. He offers them to other people, warning them that he ate one and it didn't stay down ten minutes. (That is a glyphosate reaction. He has other problems too, but if you monitor his complaints, they follow the timing of the poisoning of the railroad near his house. He felt bad after inhaling vapors and then couldn't keep that glyphosate-poisoned apple down.)

So one day he doesn't answer the door. You let yourself in, and you find him lying on the bottom of the stairs, facing up, on a broken knee, a broken wrist, and two cracked ribs, barely able to push his face out of the horrible little puddle on the step nearest his head. As you approach, making guilt-stricken pity noises, he screams something that sounds like an atherosclerosis rage attack and vomits on your feet. Clearly he "can't take care of himself." Is it time to put him in a nursing home?

If he recognizes you and says no, the position of this web site is: NO. It may be time for you or someone else to move into the basement. Because he's old and has lost bone mass, it may take longer for his bones to heal than it would for yours or your child's. Because he's humiliated enough by having this reaction, even without your having seen it, he may be very unpleasant to be around--even for himself. But his life's not over yet.

He could go back to work, if he had a job he enjoyed doing, as soon as the knee permits.

He can probably drive, as soon as the wrist permits.

If he's been the head of the clan, or of your branch of it, he still is.

When we get glyphosate (and the similar chemicals some eager fools are offering to replace it) out of the food supply, your relative's digestion will probably become regular again.

Trust celiacs on this. A lot of us have already been as sick as your relative is now--some of us at appallingly early ages. We didn't tell you because we knew you didn't really want to know, but, if you know someone whose favorite fragrances are all sort of compatible with Oxy's Pet Odor Eliminator, there's a reason for this. We went gluten-free, we'd been overtraining just in order to be flabby or skinny sickly people all those years, we became positively athletic and so perky as to be annoying.

A glyphosate ban will have similar effects on your competent but incontinent elders. And the one who's seventy-five just might have a hot date again, too.

And the one who wants to be in the retirement project rather than the nursing home, if he can't be in his own home? The retirement project is the place for him all right. We know because he still knows where he is.

Am I going to move into the project as your relative's attendant? Don't be ridiculous. This post is about women as well as men, but if we're talking about male retirees, moving in with them is for their sons or nephews to do. For me to do it would be a disgrace. That some men in the project are not living with their sons or nephews in their own homes is already a disgrace. Don't get me started.

Even for me to move in with someone else's mother or aunt would be a disgrace, because hello, my own mother is an eighty-year-old celiac. I have to be free to stay with her, if that becomes necessary.

However, considering the number of retirees who are having these occasional episodes of incontinence, I see no reason why the retirees shouldn't pool their resources and hire a few younger people to come in and mop their floors.

It's not incompetence. It's not senility. It is SIMPLE FOOD POISONING.

Tim Kaine on Direct Care Workers

From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA):

"

Dear friend,

Our population is aging, and there's a growing demand for care. Direct care workers - including, personal care aides, home health aides, and nursing assistants - provide critical assistance to older Americans, people with disabilities, and others with chronic conditions. These workers play an integral role in our health care system and we need to do what we can to support their important work.

This week, I joined Representative Bobby Scott to introduce the Direct Creation, Advancement, and Retention of Employment Opportunity Act to address the need for well-trained direct care workers. The bill would improve training and mentoring for those taking on careers in direct care and also aims to improve the recruitment, retention, and career advancement of these workers.

You can read more about our bill here.

These workers support the most vulnerable people in our communities. Our bill is an effort to help ensure that their work is valued as highly as it should be and that they have the resources needed to effectively do their jobs.

Sincerely, [signature graphic: Tim Kaine]

"

There's not a link to the actual text of the bill. This is often a bad sign. The first link opens the press release version of the e-mail; the second link opens an article about it. A "bill to improve training and mentoring" sounds likely to make things harder, not easier, for family members seeking fair compensation for what they may be able to do for people with disabilities.

Morgan Griffith on Energy Security

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9:

"

Monday, September 23, 2019 –                                

Energy Production Means Energy Security

On Saturday, September 14, explosions rocked oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. Attention quickly turned to Iran as the culprit behind the blasts, which cut Saudi oil production in half at the time.

Possible conflict between two of the Middle East’s major powers is a big news story. In another era, it would capture even more attention in the United States. Fortunately, technological innovation and smart energy policies have provided us with a measure of protection from these incidents.

Great strides in energy independence mean we are no longer so captive to events in the often-volatile Middle East.

If you were alive in the 1970s, you likely recall the energy crises consumers faced here, caused in part by Middle Eastern politics and production challenges in the United States. You may remember cars waiting in long lines for gasoline (I remember only being able to refuel my mother’s car on certain days of the week based on my license plate number) or President Carter asking Americans to turn down their thermostats in winter.

In 2011, as the nationwide average gas price hovered around $4 a gallon, President Obama said, “We can’t just drill our way out of the problem.”

Yet today, as AAA lists the national average gas price as $2.667 on September 23, we can see that domestic drilling did help solve the problem. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration indicate that in 2018, the United States was the world’s leading oil producer at 17.87 million barrels a day, 18 percent of the world’s total. Saudi Arabia followed with 12.42 million barrels per day and a 12 percent share of total world production.

We are not just powering our own country through oil production; we are powering the world. As a CNN article noted only two days before the attack on the Saudi oil facilities, the United States in June overtook Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s top oil exporter. Although Saudi Arabia reclaimed the top spot for the next two months, we are in contention.

Oil is far from our only asset in energy. The United States hit a record high in natural gas production in 2018 and was a net exporter for the second year in a row. Before 2017, our country had not been a natural gas net exporter since 1957.

Because America did not follow Democrats down that path and instead focused on developing domestic sources of energy, we are much more secure from the shocks of the worldwide energy market.

Good energy policy also requires us not to rest on our laurels. Research and development allow us to find new potential sources of energy as well as get more out of the energy resources we already use.

Allowing domestic energy production to flourish and devoting resources to research have important implications in Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District as well as nationally.

“All of the above” energy policies supporting production mean the Federal Government does not smother coal under blankets of regulation. We saw the consequences of this during the Obama Administration. In contrast, I have championed, and the Trump Administration has implemented, the lifting of burdensome regulations from coal production. Although low natural gas prices have hindered coal’s resurgence, it remains a source of energy both domestically and internationally.

I have also supported domestic energy in the Ninth District through legislative efforts to streamline and accelerate licensing for hydroelectric projects and federal funding through the Abandoned Mine Land Pilot Program to build solar installations.

Research and development, including exciting projects at Virginia Tech, allow us to use more of what we already have in Southwest Virginia. For example, it has the potential to find new uses for coal.

I believe that without the right energy policies, the shock to the U.S. energy market of the attacks in Saudi Arabia would have been much more severe, with serious consequences for our national security as well as consumer pocketbooks.

Democrats in Congress nevertheless advocate policies that would restore hurdles to domestic energy production. Their Green New Deal would entirely suppress many of the energy sources that have propelled America to energy dominance.

The benefits of the energy self-sufficiency we enjoy today remind us why we should reject such an approach. Energy production in the United States has strengthened our security as well as our economy.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.

"

What You Probably Won't Read on Kevin Folta's Blog

The US Right To Know web site blocked Monsanto's long-term fan Kevin Folta. Yesterday someone shared a link to his complaint, at his own blog, that his pro-Bayer posts had been "scientific" and even "kind." For those who don't know, Folta calls himself a scientist and does link to scientific studies, although in the Glyphosate Awareness chat we've seen that he selectively clings to outdated, pro-Monsanto studies.

Just to see whether he'd block this comment, I posted it to his blog:

"
Glyphosate has generated misunderstanding because individual reactions are so different. People don't want to believe that one chemical triggers a mild allergy in one test subject, a drastic autoimmune reaction in another, and no obvious reaction in another; if glyphosate is "really" causing one symptom in A then it can't "really" be involved in completely different symptoms in B and C. Well, it is. Confusion is understandable.

However, for someone who's defended a product that has made people seriously ill, "kindness" would sound like "I am so sorry, please forgive me, of course this product must be banned immediately and I'm so grateful if you'll let me live to support the campaign for a total ban."

We are talking about a product that triggers an autoimmune reaction that has literally torn bleeding strips as long as my fingers off me. It has similar, but never quite the same, effects on my mother and some of her other relatives. For someone else, who didn't have that kind of reaction, it produced paralysis for 39 days. I've seen active, healthy, employed people swallow "healthy" foods (like V8) that contained glyphosate residues (I passed), and run out to the porch and vomit. Fresh on the road yesterday morning was the unmistakable evidence that some other poor soul had uncontrollably spewed glyphosate-laced food--up or down is hard to say. I know people who stay at home and discourage visits because they want to clean up their own messes, privately. I know people who have other types of reactions that have made various diseases "chronic" and turned formerly healthy people into recluses, because this one loses control of his feet and falls down, that one develops vertigo and falls down, etc. etc. etc. Two friends' sons have this mysterious new kind of "chronic mononucleosis" though one's not even old enough to have had mono (he had measles). A little girl who likes school is having to miss school because she's "draggy," and her mother's thyroid fails, on certain days--the days after these spray poisoning episodes. I've seen many animals die, some quickly and some horribly. One of my relatives survived many of his glyphosate reactions for years, then finally died in one of them.

You have to have tracked these things through years of "Bad Times" when everyone in the neighborhood was ill at once, and the one thing those times had in common was a spray poisoning episode followed by several days without rain--and then read the scientific literature that documents the diversity of "minority reactions" across all species studied, humans, animals, birds, fish, or insects--to be able to wrap your mind around this bizarre new set of data. It's so different from the way we learned in school that poisons can be traced by a single effect they produce on all victims. Skepticism I can understand, but the evidence is just piling up--a really scientific consideration of the evidence does not leave people skeptical.

I think you, Kevin Folta, can honestly claim that you've been civil. I think "kindness" is going too far.

To be fair, I don't claim that I've always felt or tried to sound "kind" to those who cling to glyphosate, either.
"

The question is whether "kindness" to those who are actively harming others is really kindness. What we want is of course a ban on any use of glyphosate, and on any spraying of any poison on land, to make it impossible for people whose brains have probably been damaged by glyphosate vapors to go on killing themselves and others. How long are people going to wait, when they see people continue to make them and their children sick because some people are too lazy to cut back or dig up a weed? If Congress fail to ban glyphosate right away, will we read of chemical "farmers" being drowned in their own spray tanks? The position of this web site is that, if we simply cut off their access to sprayable poisons, we may have the delightful experience of seeing some spray-poison addicts recover their sanity, see how much better they feel too, and kiss the ground at our feet with gratitude for having helped them break their addictive cycles. This web site reminds people that the not-very-long-term effects of a total ban will be more pleasant than any violent corrective action would be.

However, since I've been notified that I'm past due for jury duty this summer, I'll say this. If I were to be on the jury hearing a case of the drowning of a spray-poison "farmer" in a vat of his own poison, it'd be the same as if I'd been on the jury in the Bobbitt case. People who use excessive force to defend themselves from poisoning, rape, or other violent crimes, should definitely have to sit through at least two hours of counselling about better ways to defend themselves in the future.

You can't really see it but that pale irregular mass is a solid lump of eggshell my last Jenny Wren passed, just before she died, during a glyphosate spraying episode. Kindness? I don't really think there's any need to feed Kevin Folta something that would cause a proportionate chunk of calcium to tear itself out through any part of him...but I'm not sure how much of that's kindness, and how much is frugality. My point is that arguing in favor of doing that to other songbirds is not kindness.

On the other hand? Can the spray-poison "farmers" whine, "This Priscilla King ought to have to dig up kudzu roots by hand!"? Hah. I'll do that. I'll even give them a discount on my usual fee for a day's work. (Yes, it can take a day to dig up a kudzu root without bruising it, but think how much "clearer" a field is after you've removed just one monster kudzu vine.) And I'll be laughing all the way to the bank. 

Those "weeds" the poisons aren't even killing any more? They're less valuable than they used to be because they've been poisoned...but some of them are food, and some of them are medicine. Spray-poison "farmers" have been spending their money to destroy what they could have made into cash crops.

Short Heavy Fiction: JR Gets the News

And here's the next thing on the to-do list: a Free Sample. Someone asked for a novel about a young man who, like Bill Clinton, has to try to reach some sort of peace with a dying father-figure. Since Bill Clinton has told his own story rather well, and it just may be the best thing he gave to this country, this fictional story of how the character comes to that first step toward forgiveness is a mash-up. Bits of my stepson’s story were in my mind, bits of my own, bits of an ex-boyfriend’s, bits of men's published memoirs. This summer I've been reading my way through a box of vintage magazines my father saved; his notes on the covers called attention to other articles, but the majority of those magazines contained a father-son, or rarely a father-daughter, reconciliation story.

This story is a heavy read. If it grows into a novel, it will get heavier. Its purpose is to vent some feelings the collaborator and I have lived through, not to embarrass our other relatives, but to encourage people to think and talk about reconciliation with their parents (or with their children). Mr. Spencer is a callous heel, his son's becoming another, and in the potential novel about him his family will meet parents who are even harder to love...except that, sometimes, love seems to improve them.

***

The phone was ringing. He didn’t recognize the number. He pressed the button to put the caller  on hold while he transferred the call to his answering service. Instead he heard a stranger’s voice: “...James Randall Spencer, please.”

“Speaking.” If the woman was selling something he’d blast her...

“JR, my name is Caroline Murray. I’m your stepmother,” she said.

His ears rang. He heard his heart pounding at the top of his aching head.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but your father is ill,” she said. “The doctors at University Hospital are fairly sure he has cancer, but they’ve not located the cancer yet. It would mean a great deal to him if you could spend some time with him now.”

“Time,” he repeated idiotically, massaging his scalp.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I know that’s a shock—well, it’s been one to me, to see him deteriorate so fast. His kidneys are involved. His blood minerals go in and out of balance; he goes in and out of touch with reality. When he does know what’s going on, JR, he always asks about you. He didn’t want me to call you or your mother, and yet he does want to see you again. More than anything, I think. We don’t know how many days he may have. The sooner you could come out, the better. He’s very ill.”

“Stepmother,” he said, trying to make sense of what he’d just heard. “My mother never told me I had a stepmother.”

“We’ve been together almost ten  years,” she said. “I always hoped to meet you under better circumstances. You’re not a boxer, are you?”

“Boxer? Not since high school. I work for a telecommunications company.”

“I thought so. JR, your father always wants to watch boxing, but only lightweight boxing, because that was your sport in high school.”

“Sh—” he blurted.

“Well don’t say it to me, say it to him,” she said. “Stepson, please—I know nothing about your situation. All I know is that when my husband loses memories of everything else, he asks about you. I’m sure you know where to find the University Hospital, where Dr. Wetherby is the head of the cancer department. When your father’s not there, he’s at home...do you have our address?”

He wrote down the address, read it back to her, wrote down her and his father’s phone numbers. His headache had subsided into numbness, and not a blindness, but a sort of tunnel vision. He saw letters and numbers on a notepad. He saw more letters and numbers on his computer screen. Those numbers related to a work-related problem, which was soluble. His eyes held on to those numbers as if they were the ropes and posts of a pier. He landed on the accounting problem and tinkered with codes and numbers. Before the end of the day he was able to tell the accounting department what to shut down while he plugged in his solution. It seemed to work perfectly.

He drove himself home, thinking about his elegant solution  to the accounting data problem. He was a precision driver; that was one thing he’d inherited from the old man. No chorus of horns warned him that only part of his mind was steering the car.

Stepmother.

His parents had always agreed that their marriage had been a mistake. They stayed together because they’d had a church wedding. They went to church together on Sundays, and entertained his father’s few friends from work and his mother’s dozens of new connections on Saturdays. His mother had always kept her looks; his father had always seemed sincerely proud of that. At home, his father was usually out of the country on business—it was no secret that he’d chosen a job with as much international travel as possible. When the old man did come home after work, he went straight into the den. If the woman didn’t pursue him into the den for a quarrel, the man drank himself to sleep in front of the TV.

As a child JR had always seen his beautiful, vivacious mother’s side of things. She was emotional; she said terrible things to him, as she did to his father, when she was angry, but she was extra-nice to make up for it afterward. Then he’d realized, when the news channels went into their feeding frenzy, that one of her pet politicians had been caught hosting a drug party with money his own mother had raised by cheating poor people out of their homes. Everyone thought his mother had a warm and loving heart. JR knew his mother’s heart was as cold and hard as his father’s.

So far as he could tell the old man’s heart was pure anthracite. James Martin Spencer had taught him to swim by throwing him into the pool, taught him not to be afraid of bullies by signing him up for boxing, and taught him to stay sober by lacing his first few drinks with emetic pills. JR hated bullies and, so far as he knew, JM Spencer was the meanest bully he’d ever faced.

How a man like JM Spencer had ever persuaded one woman to marry him, JR didn’t want to know, but now apparently there were three. His mother was a second wife JM used to compare, always unfavorably, to the first one, and now JR had a stepmother.

JR had promised himself he wouldn’t walk into the trap that had destroyed whatever good qualities his parents must once have had. In high school, where he’d been a skinny geek with a painfully cultivated set of boxing moves, never dating the same girl twice was no problem. In his twenties, when his mother’s eyebrows and father’s cheekbones and so on finally came together to form an adult face, he’d been tearfully called a heartbreaker, a callous heel, and a closet gay. At thirty-five he’d become comfortable enough with his flaming feminist housemate Norah Lee that their other housemates had moved out, then been replaced by the children in the front room.

They were his children, beyond all doubt. If their faces hadn’t shown it, their fierce concentration on their game would have done. He’d insisted on their video games being the kind that called for large muscle movement. As he walked in, so far as JR could tell, James Jefferson’s little dance was steering a getaway car through a Rocky Mountain pass while Tamara Louise’s was blowing the wheels off the gangsters’ cars.

He walked past them to Norah’s home office.

“Riga, dear, I can’t just write that chapter for you. If you want to put it in, you’ve got to tell me what happened.”

JR waited. Norah quietly clicked her mouse, no doubt working on a whole separate document, while the heiress sobbed on about the chapter her fans most wanted to read being too painful to write.

“Well, you don’t have to go into all the details do you? You can say you blacked out or spaced out or something and don’t remember what happened next.”

If JR had ever formed the smoking habit he could have smoked two cigarettes or more while Riga von Hake ululated into Norah’s phone. Instead he considered different ways of saying what was on his mind, finding all of them equally bad, and watched Norah multitask.

“Oh yes!”Norah clicked back, obviously, to the memoir she was ghostwriting. Riga von Hake talked more than a hundred words a minute when she got going. Norah was her ghostwriter because Norah’s fingers could keep up with her. “Mhm,” she murmured, typing, and “Oh,” and “Oh no.”

The address the stepmother had given him was in a neighborhood JR’s mother would have avoided. Maybe that was why. JR’s mother believed in using money to impress people; his father, not so much. It wasn’t a slum, exactly. JR had been in that neighborhood. The scholarship kids at his high school lived there. Little look-alike houses were all packed together on the slope of the hill below the best public elementary school in the county. Kids played in the low-traffic streets; adults grilled and gardened in the yards. Would JM Spencer have moved there because he and this Murray woman had a school-age child? Did JR now have stepsiblings the age of his own children?

He pictured the old man sitting in his armchair, more than half drunk. “What’d you do all day?”

“I fixed the part of the accounting system the accounting people keep messing up.”

“How long d’it take you?”

“About six hours.”

“Six hours? An accounting system like that? You ought to have been able to rewrite the entire system from the DOS prompt up in three hours.”

To block it out he’d liked to hang out with friends who, according to the old man, weren’t worth counting as friends. Maybe they weren’t. The crowd started to break up when one new chemical experiment of Marla’s sent several of them to the hospital. Some of them were still locked up there. Jeremy, the suspected squealer, was run down by a car that fit the description of the one Marla’s brother used to drive, and Paul, the actual squealer, became a missing person. Sitting on Paul’s bed with Paul’s family pet purring beside him, JR had helped generate a new identity for Paul: Tom Gray. About ten years ago, feeling curious, he’d found that Tom Gray was also a missing person, now.

“Breathe,” Norah was saying. “Biofeedback time. Count one deep breath below the big red one. Count two deep breaths below the big orange two...”

JR let himself visualize the numbers along with Riga von Hake. It was silly but it helped.

“So where are those friends of yours now?” the old man had rasped.

“I don’t know,” seventeen-year-old JR lied.

“Well, I do! They’re behind bars, aren’t they? Where druggies like that belong!”

It was June. Seventeen-year-old JR had a summer job to do before he went to college. He went upstairs and wrote a note telling his parents not to worry; he’d heard of an even better job and was going to college now. Hah. He’d been all set for an internship in a government office. Arriving after all the summer jobs on the mall were taken, he’d been lucky to get work as a busboy, especially as he’d started the summer living in a shelter. He used to get to sleep at night fantasizing that the big, posh house of his high school years was his again, because his parents were dead.

“Wow,” Norah was breathing into the phone. “You were so brave, Riga.”

JR had been brave. He’d joined a good club at college, had his share of dates later, got a good job. Norah was the closest thing he’d had to a friend since the night Paul became Tom Gray. Actually, considered as a friend, Norah was a good one. It was just more fun to consider her as the girl who used to multitask all around the house, naked, in summer. Sometimes when the children were out of the house she still did that.

“I did. I think I’ve got it all. So let me send it now, and find out what’s on my housemate’s mind, okay? It’s going to be,” Norah rolled her eyes at JR, “a sensational book.”

Forgetting the ways he’d planned to break the news, JR said, “I just heard that my father’s dying of cancer.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” JR said, and his ears began ringing again. “Might leave me some money if I go out to see him. I think I'll do that this weekend.”

Status Update: Beating Down Bullying

This is not a real, sponsored blog post, just a quick status update that relates (in a general way) to a paid writing project...I was thinking about bullying on the way into town, and then the first thing I saw in the e-mail was Dan Lewis's very cute story about an aquarium's efforts to reduce bullying among fish.

http://nowiknow.com/the-aquarium-that-turned-a-blind-eye-toward-bullies/



A hundred years ago, the word "bully" most often referred to a young man. It was often spoken with approval. "Bully beef" was marketed as a better grade than ordinary steers' beef. Theodore Roosevelt used "bully" as a general term of praise like "swell" or "fine." The popular song about "The Bully of the Town" expressed an intention to challenge the guy for leadership of a (not necessarily criminal) gang; fighting for dominance seems to have been one of the things guys in their teens and twenties were expected to do, after work, along with playing sports and, if they were lucky, tinkering with cars.

As people became more concerned that fighting with their friends was more likely to make young men violent and abusive than to make them good soldiers, the meaning of "bully" went through the process linguists call pejoration. It was more often applied to little boys than to young men. By the 1970s, most of us had a mental image of a "bully" as an eight-year-old boy who beats up five-year-old boys.

Then in the 1990s more attention was paid to the subtler ways girls (and older, smarter boys) make their schoolmates miserable, not usually by beating them up, but by leaving them out of things, laughing at unexplained jokes in a way that makes the people who are left out think they're the joke, and general verbal abuse. Yes, girls could be bullies too.

And the late-blooming guys with glasses who hung out in the computer lab? In the Information Age, they could do some serious bullying. College guys might laugh at the gawky nearsighted fellow who tripped over his fast-growing feet but three years later, when he went to work for the IRS, guess whose taxes were next to be audited.

For, no surprise, adults do not outgrow bullying; they gain access to more sophisticated ways to do it. Empire-building is the ultimate form of bullying. Prejudice and discrimination, protectionist legislation, censorship, hostile gossip, and other social abuses are the usual ways adults continue the bullying behavior they learned in primary school.

Socialist politics is a form of bullying. Socialists want to make people share their stuff! They'll "nationalize" it and "redistribute" it--their way! Yarrayarrayarrrrr! Socialist governments can come to exist when very nice, peaceable, neighborly people agree to let somebody plan their lives for them. That's happened in small independent communities, and occasionally even in small countries, when conditions were just right. Swedish people, who had a very long history of communitarian practice anyway, chose to set up their own form of national socialism as an answer to the uglier kinds of national socialism stronger countries were threatening to inflict on them. It didn't make them a strong enough, rich enough, or large enough nation to stand up to the huge Russian army or the fierce German one, but it did keep people from falling for the idea that German-style or Russian-style socialism was what they needed, and it won the sympathy of other countries that helped Sweden avoid being absorbed into the Third Reich or the Soviet Union. Sweden has become poorer in some ways by adopting Swedish-style socialism, but it has remained intact. This has made Sweden the wonder of the world. In other countries, in order to last very long, socialist governments have become bullies and tyrants...or else they've quietly abandoned their socialist ideals.

People in other countries have wished for a long time that their countries could be more like pacifist Switzerland, and in the twentieth century they started wishing their countries could be more like almost-successfully socialist Sweden. I don't believe that can happen. What those countries have in common is that they're small, with geographical conditions that have rigorously selected for a small, sparse population who have more or less chosen to be there as part of a large voluntary community. Sweden was ethnically homogeneous into the late twentieth century, while Switzerland is so heterogeneous they've never even agreed on a single national language, so blondness is not the key factor. Brutal winter weather probably is a factor. Sparse population is probably the most important factor. In order for a nation to function as a voluntary community people probably have to be spread out widely enough for thoughts like "Who cares if the people in the next town down the road want to speak a different language? If we ever need to talk to them, we'll find a way" to become commonplace. I do not imagine this happening in any English-speaking country.

The political opposite of bullying is libertarian politics. There are different schools of libertarian thought, and the Libertarian Party, in the United States, has failed to grow because it's failed to unify around a consensus among those schools. Libertarians should be people who can agree to disagree about economic plans, religious beliefs or the lack of them, fashions, manners, etc.; this agreement to disagree can make it hard to rally behind a candidate. My libertarian thought is probably closest to Jim Babka's ideals of "complete nonviolence" and "voluntary-ism."

Libertarians realize that, even if you and I think Billy ought to share his stuff, the only way we can make Billy share his stuff is to become a bigger, meaner bully than he is. That's not good for us, it's not good for the little brother who wants to use Billy's crayons, and--badly though Billy might need a good whack on the seat of the pants--it's not really even good for Billy. So what we can do, instead, is organize a game that everyone else will want to play, and when Billy wants to play, too, we can tell him he has to choose to share his crayons in order to join our game. We have to respect his freedom of choice. We have to push ourselves to be smarter leaders than Billy, rather than meaner bullies. If we're smart leaders who want for some reason to surround ourselves with a voluntary community that agree to be guided by socialist or communist ideals, we can organize one--but we have to limit membership to people who want to be part of our community.

These days we hear a lot of candidates for office promising, in one way or another, "Give the U.S. federal government, or the U.N. as a global government, total control of all the money and we'll make everybody happier." Right-wing advocates of government expansion openly say they want more power to enforce stricter laws at gun-point. Left-wing advocates of government expansion talk about wanting more money to help people and more power to rescue people, but since they're talking about bigger government, what they mean is more power to enforce stricter laws at gun-point. The helping and sharing parts sound good, but that's not the way they're going to happen.

But expanding the powers of government, getting rid of that scary, "chaotic" democracy where people are responsible for their own choices and the bullies have no way to predict what they might do, is only one way adults extend bullying behavior into the adult social world. Nagging, gossipping, chattering, clamoring for dress codes or censorship...any time we try to get behind people and push them to do what we want, rather than honestly asking them to do what we want (and respecting their right to tell us the rewards we offer aren't enough to get them to do it), we're trying to be bullies.

For those true extroverts who become anxious when they're not in full control of someone else's attention, the temptation to be a bully is constant and needs to be constantly repressed. "I was just being friendly. I just want to talk to people. How can you be around other people and not want to talk to them?" The answer to this question, which is probably a sincere one, is "By respecting their right to lead their own lives without my interference." This concept probably needs to be pounded into the heads of little extroverts from the day they first toddle toward another toddler, squawking for attention. If those other people have anything close to normal lives and levels of competence, it's almost certain that they have at least fifty other things that they believe need more of their attention than you or I do.

Those of us who've developed enough of a talent and enough of a conscience to be called introverts don't usually find it difficult to imagine that other people have their own lives but we may find it difficult to imagine that, because they have lives, other people may not have learned as much about something as we have. In yesterday's Glyphosate Awareness chat I was accused of "condescending" to someone who has the Twitter profile of an ignorant party-line left-winger, who tweeted something about being anti-glyphosate but not thinking it was something to be greatly concerned about. Whether or not the accusation was part of the ugly social bullying pattern that's become common among young leftists, the "Follow my party line exactly or I'll call you a nasty name," is irrelevant because the fact is that I do feel "condescending" toward people who've been ignoring the harm glyphosate's done to people in the last eleven years. More than that, I'm tempted to feel like a martyred saint when I only talk down to them, rather than demanding that their death by torture begin today. I'm not immune to all temptation to engage in social bullying.

This web site, once again, affirms an anti-bullying position, and asks readers to consider when and how we may be tempted to engage in some form of bullying.

Do we try to shove our message in front of people with clickbait e-mail headers ("You have to open this e-mail to find out what it's about!"), screen-hogging ads that demand that readers do something about the ad in order to get on with reading the story, efforts to override people's right to ignore us if they're not interested in the contents of our web sites? This web site has never done those things but many otherwise excellent web sites do them.

Do we demand that people we pass by on the street, or even wait on in the workplace, interrupt their thoughts or even their conversation to indulge us in "greeting" behavior--even when these "greetings" are not redeeming themselves by opening real conversations? The function of words like "Hello, how are you" is to entrain the brains of people who have something of substance to say to each other. Some of us are tempted to subvert "greetings" into grown-up versions of a toddler's squawks and screams for attention.

Do we spew hate at people with whom we disagree? Donald Trump obviously has no problem with people calling him a clown. Barack Obama probably feels pain when people call him a token, but he's obviously learned to cope with it. And so on through the list of nastier insults this web site's policy bars repeating. As long as we're not actually talking to either one of them I suppose the great American tradition of insulting the President does less harm than other things people might say. But the partisan political cyberbullying at some forums and social sites does more harm than people realize...to the people who indulge in it, and to the causes they support. I've got through more than fifty years without feeling any desire to put on a red hat, even upon the occasion of reaching the qualifying age for membership in the Red Hat Society (old ladies who recognize that life is too short to put off doing the things we want to do), but ever since a Democrat blogger whined that seeing Trump supporters' red hats aggravates her emotional problems, I've had an irrational urge to go out and buy a Trump hat. And I didn't even vote for Trump. The hatespews, the name-calling and howls for censorship, need to stop before they make it impossible for any of us to support any party.

Well, this is long enough for a status update. On to the next item on the list...

Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter 8

There would have been more news in this newsletter if I hadn't been sick yesterday. Not too sick to work around the house, but definitely too sick to be out in public. I really thought it might have been a virus, because several people mentioned being sick yesterday. Then this morning, after finally getting some sleep, swallowing some food, and not feeling urgently sick (it had finally rained a bit), I saw the browned-out grass along the road...

The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published weekly by Priscilla King, c/o Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. It’s available free, in plain text as an e-mail or attachment. Printed or audiocassette versions are available for the cost of production. (Audiofiles are free to anyone who can convince me that s/he is blind and can’t read a document aloud using widely available software.) Reprinting, recirculating, and sharing this information at the reader’s own expense is encouraged, provided that all sources of material are credited.

1. WHY AREN’T OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS DOING THE LIVE CHAT?

Although I’ve certainly invited my elected officials to the live chat on Tuesdays, 2-3 p.m. Eastern time, and I’m sure you’ve invited yours, seriously, how many elected officials actually want to be caught participating in a Twitter Live Chat? How...Trumpy. My State Delegate does officially tweet during the state legislative session, but only about what’s going on, on the floor, and it’d be downright unpatriotic to expect him to look at tweets about anything but bills; when he’s at home, earning his credibility by being a good neighbor and lawyer, he’s mostly offline. Your people are busy too, and their eyes aren’t getting any younger.

We need to make it easier for them. Your elected officials receive stacks of printed material from industry lobbyists, along with free samples and social invitations and all sorts of goodies some people think they ought to refuse to take. They receive more stacks of printed material from partisan lobbyists like Friends of the Earth, who have the right idea about glyphosate but tend to bundle it together with a lot of other ideas that some of us might not endorse. They hire help to sort, file, maybe even read this stuff. Many of these helpers have young eyes, which helps, but even young eyes can’t stare at computer screens all day long.

Here’s what you can do: Print and mail your Newsletters to your elected officials (they are supposed to recycle mail that doesn’t come through a post office in their districts). Or, if you want to be flashy, you might even choose to fax the Newsletters to them. Elected officials you don’t know personally probably prefer faxes, tedious as those are to handle, because some of them still remember the year some lifeform even lower down the scale than Bayer’s goons mailed out first-class letters with nasty stuff in the envelopes. If you don’t want to inflict faxes on the world or burden the congressional office buildings with envelopes, you might want to experiment with printing key information on single pages you can fold and send through the mail—stamp and addresses on the front, content below the fold.

Visit your elected officials’ web sites to find out more about their systems for handling incoming messages. If their web sites sort messages by topic, you should do that too. If you get a reply from a staffer, cherish this attention from an Official Expert on the Topic, and address follow-up correspondence to that person. If you still have a land phone, I’d never recommend putting your phone number on the Internet, but I would recommend sharing it with legislative staff. They may get unlimited free or cheap long distance calls, and if incoming calls aren’t costing you money, that’s definitely the way to talk with them.

2. WHY “GOOD” BRANDS LIKE KELLOGG’S AND LOMA LINDA ARE STILL TOXIC

Monsanto bought pieces of a lot of food brands before selling out to Bayer. Although these brands aren’t officially Bayer brands...here’s why Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is full of glyphosate and GMO: Ben and Jerry sold out, years ago, to Con Agra, which sold out to...The precise current ownership of some of these corporations is debatable, since this list was compiled before the merge, but basically, if it’s a huge nationwide brand found in all big-chain supermarkets everywhere, it’s probably tied to Monsanto and it probably contains glyphosate. And if the people who originally produced it, when it was something safe to eat and even nutritious, are still alive, like Ben and like Jerry, they’re probably very unhappy with what’s been done with their original, excellent idea.

https://vocal.media/feast/food-brands-owned-by-monsanto

3. NO SPRAYING WITHIN 2 KILOMETERS OF A RESIDENCE

Quebec was where, in the 1980s, a map of Parkinson’s Disease was found to show a weird resemblance to a map of “pesticide” use. Quebeckers have not forgotten this, much as some people wanted Parkinson’s Disease research to forget it (the map appeared on Michael J. Fox’s web site, temporarily, and was pulled down). (The map was discussed in Oliver Sacks’ Case of the Frozen Addicts, book and movie.) Daphne Cameron reports on a bold, forward-thinking move to demand a ban on all “pesticide applications” within 2000 meters of a residence. Opponents of the proposal are already claiming that, if it’s enacted into law, it’ll be used to interfere with the sale, maintenance, or reclaiming of rural houses in order to give greedheads more acres they can legally poison...We all need a ban on spraying any poison within ten miles of a residence, and we also need a ban, just to keep the greedheads from grabbing for more small farms, on marketing any “food” that contains any trace of any “pesticide.”

https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/environnement/201909/05/01-5239878-pas-depandage-de-pesticides-a-moins-de-2-km-des-residences-reclament-des-organismes.php

Incidentally, the article above mentions that the pesticide most likely to have been involved in Parkinson’s Disease was an older one than glyphosate, known as paraquat. Paraquat, Cameron claims, has been used to produce symptoms of that disease (neuromuscular spasms) in laboratory animals.

4. GLYPHOSATE AWARENESS SALUTES ROSEMARY MASON

The United Kingdom has its own Queen of Glyphosate Awareness: Rosemary Mason.

https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/09/officials-ignore-pesticides-and-blame-alcohol-and-biscuits-for-rising-rates-of-disease/

Because Glyphosate Awareness is non-partisan even about US politics, this newsletter hereby refuses to add any further comment on the relevance of Dr. Mason’s paper to current UK politics. Actually I think Colin Todhunter’s said it all. For those who’ve not been following British news lately, some background...Where do we need to begin? Britain joined the European Union many years ago. Some people in Britain want to dissolve that alliance. Our President likes this because he thinks it’ll lock the UK into an exclusive trade deal with the US. Some people in Britain fear that, if that deal went down, it would subject them to, among other things, toxic US food. Since they don’t have a glyphosate ban their fears are beyond the scope of this newsletter. Here’s a sample British explanation of what they do fear (quite rightly I’m afraid).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-us-trade-deal-food-standards-chlorinated-chicken-gm-brexit-a9060876.html

5. ON THE DARK CONTINENTS, THE DENIAL CONTINUES

This unenlightened, outdated article published in South Africa echoes the stale whining we find in North and South America. Hello, Johannes Richter? The claim that glyphosate contributes to cancer is not based entirely on mouse studies, any more. It is based on more ominous, longer-term human studies. There’s no rational way to deny that most of the documented glyphosate reactions promote the growth of cancer, but the statistical debate at this point is between a study that suggested that people who handled glyphosate were much more likely to get two rare forms of cancer than other people, and another study that suggested that, maybe, they weren’t. (All the studies suggest that glyphosate exposure may indeed reduce an individual’s risk of developing some slow-growing cancers—very likely by causing the individual to die from other reactions before the cancers have a chance.) Glyphosate Awareness encourages editors to stop publishing this kind of display of ignorance.

https://croplife.co.za/pesticide-use-in-the-wine-industry-placed-in-context/

6. QUIRKY LOSES THE CONCEPT

I posted at Quirky.com the idea that the inventors there invent workable boiler and steamer devices for delivering safe, well controlled jets of steam or hot water to targeted plants, rendering pesticides obsolete. How funny to find that that page isn’t showing up on Quirky.com any more. They say people can bat ideas around into marketable forms...apparently they want to limit those ideas to cheap joke gifts.

7. GLYPHOSATE HARMS FISH

When glyphosate is sprayed near the bodies of water where fish can still live, in North America, it’s not uncommon to find fish floating or beached downstream. Here, in a scholarly journal whose print date is scheduled for November, is the write-up of a study of exactly how glyphosate harms the next generation of itty-bitty fishies:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166445X19301559

8. BEEKEEPERS ABUZZ

Beekeepers (who’ve chosen to post a video rather than a useful document) are suing “the Trump Administration” for failing to ban glyphosate already. Nice try, beekeepers. I think we’ll have more luck leaning on Congress, to regulate a misguided executive branch, rather than suing the President, but some people don’t like their Congressmen and want to sue somebody. Meh. In addition to suing manufacturers of glyphosate, we could sue the un-neighborly, stubborn, stupid people who’ve continued to spray the stuff since this summer’s TV ad blitz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlriaH0s8ks&feature=youtu.be

9. GLYPHOSATE-TAINTED VACCINE CAUSES “ANTI-VAXXER” REACTIONS

This is news? Maybe. Some of us might have thought that “anti-vaxxers” are just people who don’t like needles, or who, having got through life well enough when only seven vaccines were recommended for babies, aren’t sure why seventy vaccines may now be pushed upon the modern baby. Wrong, says Robert Kennedy (Junior). Several of them became “anti-vaxxers” because they or their children reacted to a specific batch of vaccine that was tainted with glyphosate.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-response-to-the-message-of-measles-what-the-new-yorker-wouldnt-publish/

10. CAN A WOMAN CLEAN UP THE BULLYBOYS’ MESS?

Bayer hires former Johnson & Johnson chief Marianne DeBacker, Ph.D., as “head of business development and licensing of pharmaceuticals.” At least we can hope that DeBacker won’t be as sexist as some Bayer employees have shown themselves to be. For more than that, Ben Adams doesn’t offer much hope...

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/j-j-s-de-backer-jumps-ship-to-bayer-to-seek-out-r-d-pacts-but-after-monsanto-don-t-expect

11. AUSTRALIANS START SUING BAYER, TOO

Copycats. Though probably right.

https://www.9news.com.au/health/roundup-cancer-weed-killer-glysophate-farming-agriculture/e7e7ef5c-7f21-4f63-ada8-ddae8f341b9e

Teen'Zine Crosses Line

This post is for John Horvat at returntoorder.org . I don't know that the editor of a teen'zine site is going to be impressed by non-subscribers' pronouncements about a pro-teen-sex article being an offense against God. I do remember, though, that there are teenagers who might appreciate a frank discussion of the fact that some teenagers want to obey the law that orders them to practice abstinence until they reach the magical eighteenth birthday that's supposed to make them old enough to become parents.

Here's the e-mail I sent the'zine, which does not deserve the publicity of a link:

"
Dear Editors,

In a world where it's treated as a crime if anyone over the magic age of 18 touches a teenager's back, you're *encouraging* teenagers to think about boinking their hearts out, buying birth control pills, considering prostitution? I'm a Protestant and don't usually feel as censorious as the Catholic correspondent who complained about the August sex article seems to do, but you should be encouraging teenagers to sublimate, sublimate, and sublimate some more--not to get themselves and the people they usually find attractive (who are over 18) in trouble that may ruin their lives even 30 or 40 years later.

Believe it or not there actually *are* teenyboppers who appreciate help distracting themselves from their hormone surges. Not because they think having hormones is a sin; because they want to do something besides become teen single parents. I was one, once. I know teenagers today who would prefer that magazines try to stir up whatever hormones we baby-boomers may still have, toward one another, and tell teenagers how to pass tests, get jobs, avoid being manipulated into silly quarrels...things their hormones are not already screaming at them nonstop for three days of every month, or, when the male hormones take over, every seven seconds of every day. They don't WANT to be jailbait, or single parents, or used to ruin someone's career. They would prefer to get on with their own lives.
"

Teenaged readers are hereby encouraged to set up alternative screen names your friends won't recognize and debate this anonymously, on Disqus, below, or on Twitter. Those of us who want help to practice self-control, whether tempted by sex, food, alcohol, angry outbursts, fears, procrastination, laziness, or whatever else, don't need to be teased about it, but we would appreciate not having temptation shoved in our faces.

Which is why, as a teenager, I seldom read the printed magazines that used to consist of "Darling, you are growing up" or "Look at this stranger's face, it's supposed to make your heart throb" or "Buy this so you'll look sexier in the sponsor-approved way" pieces. And I don't recommend them to today's teenyboppers, either.

Here's a book by a fellow who felt the same way. I didn't come to the same conclusions he does, because he and I grew up in different subcultures that used the word "dating" in different ways; as a teenager I liked dating, Seventh-Day Adventist style, meaning you go to a school or church thing with a friend of the opposite sex, free of charge, and if you had a particularly nice time you shake hands. But Joshua Harris, Wendy Shalit, and other writers are onto something. If adult society wants teenagers not to be single parents, we have to stop trying to use sex to sell them stuff, too. Fair is fair.

Tom DeWeese on "Developments" We Do Not Need

After posting our Congressman's latest, I next found this e-mail from Tom DeWeese. It's a fundraiser but it exposes the problems built into many "development grants"--people who want to destroy small farms and rural communities, and herd people into slums. "Planners" want to replicate the conditions that made (some of) our ancestors leave old Europe, to replace the conditions that allowed our more recent ancestors and us to enjoy better lives than people do in Europe. Let's be clear: Some people who think this way may also be socialists and/or Europeans, but basically it's about money. They want to make money on those slums. This is the kind of "development" we need to avoid, in the point of Virginia and everywhere else, however alluring the grants may seem to be.

"
The attack on private property is growing across the country at a frightening rate. And the target is single-family homes – most likely -- your home.

I have warned in recent weeks that Sustainable Development/Agenda 21 advocates are now calling zoning for single-family neighborhoods RACIST!

Minneapolis, Minnesota became the first city to end single-family zoning as the Mayor called such protections “self-segregation” devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods. Unbelievable!

Seattle, Washington followed Minneapolis. Other cities are looking into such plans. The federal agency HUD is pushing such plans under the Obama program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). And city after city are taking HUD grants that force them to impose such plans.

So, attacks on single-family homes are racing across the nation.

Now Oregon is about to become the first state to eliminate single family zoning across the state...

The speaker of the Oregon House, Rep. Tina Kotek, says this action is urgent because Oregon has a “housing crisis.”

That is bunk!  Oregon has a government-made crisis. 

For over 20 years Oregon has been enforcing “Urban Growth Boundaries” (UGB) around its cities. This is part of the Sustainable “Smart Growth” policy.

As I have told my audiences around the nation, under Smart Growth, planners put an artificial line around the city and declare NO GROWTH will take place outside that line. That’s “Urban Sprawl!” And the planners insist that urban sprawl is a danger to the environment because it encourages the use of automobiles, strip malls, and the need for infrastructure like roads and power.

We used to call that building an economy until the Sustainablists declared war on human society! 

Here’s what they didn’t count on. The UGBs assure the area of the city doesn’t expand. But what happens when the population does? The only way to grow is UP!

That means there is no room for single family homes with backyards for the kids. According to the rhetoric of the Sustainablists the only solution is to flood single-family neighborhoods with duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and “cottage clusters.” They call this “up zoning.” Says Oregon House Speaker Kotek, “The state’s housing crisis requires a combination of bolder strategies.”

I love how these control freaks always use the words “bolder”, “innovative”, and “master plan” to make their destructive policies sound urgent and brave!

The truth is they are pushing their own political agenda, and when they get caught by their unworkable plans, they pretend to offer a solution to their own idiotic regulations -- which they created.

For example, Portland Oregon has long been the poster child – the shining example -- of the genius of Smart Growth praised in government and environmental meetings across the country.

Smart Growth is an utter failure as property rights have been destroyed, housing costs have skyrocketed and now there is a housing crisis!

Why? Because over the years, under Smart Growth, Portland’s population has grown by over 80%. But legislators have only allowed the Urban Growth Boundary to expand by no more than 6%!

NOW PORTLAND HAS A HOUSING CRISIS AND SO WE MUST ABOLISH SELFISH, RACIST, SINGLE-FAMILY HOMES!!!

Imagine what these policies will do to your property values – your equity – all that you have worked for?

Most people could quickly figure out the problem and dump such destructive policies. But WHY can’t your city councils and county commissions see the lies?

Because they are surrounded – inundated – with special interest Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) - private groups with their own private agendas.

The worst offender of this is the American Planning Association (APA). They, or affiliated planning groups, are in nearly every single community in the nation. They have the plans and the ability to get your local officials to apply for specific grants from HUD, EPA and other federal agencies to put it all in place.

I have fought the APA in city after city. I have exposed their lies and their tactics, exposing their direct ties to Agenda 21. As local citizens heard my warnings and took action to stop such plans in their communities, the APA panicked.

The APA rushed to create an “Agenda 21 Myths and Facts” page on their website. They did all they could to hide any connections between their planning and Agenda 21. Their planning was all local, local, local, the APA insisted.

They assured communities that planning “protects private property…preserves and protects its value.” They said “planning preserves neighborhoods, providing certainty to homeowners…”

Well, do you think calling single family home owners “racist” and destroying single family zoning protections “preserves” neighborhoods --- or destroys them? When they build an apartment building in your neighborhood will you feel “protected?”

The truth is the American Planning Association is part of the Planners Network. The network is officially part of a group called the Organization of Progressive Planners, which is, “an association of professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic and environmental planning…” That is Agenda 21!

On the website. www.plannersnetwork.org, you will find in its Statement of Principles this quote, “We believe planning should be a tool for allocating resources…and eliminating the great inequalities of wealth and power in our society…because the free market has proven incapable of doing this…”

That is social justice. Anti-free enterprise. Anti-private property. That is what every planner, working in every American city, believes!!

And the APA is digging in to promote more of Agenda 21/Sustainable Development policy which they deny exists.

Right now, the APA is sponsoring a webinar series for planners and elected officials. Here are some of the subjects they are addressing.

“New examples of cites approaching the challenge of climate change in creative and innovative ways,” including “rethinking transportation, to greening city buildings, to protecting against sea-level rise…” They go on to say the speakers at the webinars will offer guidance which “contextualizesinternational, national, and state mandates and goals.”

This is NOT local. This is NOT protection of private property. This is why you are seeing such reorganization of our local communities and counties across the nation.

The American Planning Association and its NGO co-conspirators are using their LOCAL planning lies to bring every city in the United States into compliance with UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development policy.

Let me be very clear about where this is all headed.

Single-family homes are the greatest example of private property ownership. Private property is the greatest means for individuals to build personal wealth through the equity earned. That’s why America grew so fast!

As private property ownership is destroyed, the wealth of the nation is diminishing. Now we are hearing some economists worry about a lack of housing starts in the building industry that could lead to an economic crisis.Yet, these “experts” rarely mention the true culprit – Sustainable Development, Smart Growth government tyranny!     

Now, as we see more and more housing moving toward the high-rise stack and pack rental properties, a new attack is growing – this time against private owner landlords.

New government regulations are raising taxes on landlords, along with higher building costs. But now, many communities are starting to impose rent controls, because it’s not “fair” to make people pay so much for their homes!

Here is the bottom-line goal of this attack on private property and single-family homes. If we lose this battle against Sustainable Development/Smart Growth policies, then, eventually all housing will become government controlled. There will be no private homes or condos. Only government housing!
 
A free society cannot survive that!

This is the tyranny that I have dedicated my life to stopping! The American Policy Center (APC) is the leading organization in the nation fighting to save private property.
"

With all that information I think the APC deserves a link, but their buttons were messing up the formatting of the whole page...donations will be accepted by americanpolicy.org.