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.
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.”
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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...
11. AUSTRALIANS START SUING BAYER, TOO
Copycats. Though probably right.
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