Bonus Rant: Compensation for Glyphosate-Addicted Farmers

A corporate shill on Twitter was asking for this rant. It needs to be out there, and it's too long for Twitter...

The shill asked how people calling for a glyphosate ban plan to "compensate" glyphosate-dependent farmers who can already predict exactly how much money they expect to lose, when we get that ban on the violent crime of recklessly endangering human lives by spraying poison on food crops, which there's no excuse for our not having had a hundred years ago.

Let's see. Compensation for the poisoners? They should be on their knees praying that outraged humankind do not start thinking about compensation. There's not that much gold in California, not that many diamonds in South Africa, and not that much oil under the Arab Peninsula. Compensation for all this Reckless Endangerment just might, reasonably, be taken out of these farmers' shabby carcasses.

Start, of course, with compensation for the celiacs of this world. Cancer patients deserve to collect first because most of them have less time to live, but celiacs have been suffering longer. And how exactly do you compensate people for celiac reactions? For truly amazing amounts of time, celiac reactions are surface wounds, only on internal surfaces. Irritations. Gross-outs. Strips torn off your body, repeatedly. The fact that the body is "resilient" and can become strong and healthy, when it stops being continually shredded, doesn't make the shredding process pleasant. Poisoners have been shredding my body for the past ten years. For that compensation might be possible, I suppose, except that I don't particularly want to have to go out and tear a strip off Werner Bauman every day; I have no reason to imagine that other celiacs do, either.

But although glyphosate has a unique, unmistakable, predictable effect on celiacs, its effects are by no means limited to celiac reactions, or the pseudo-celiac reactions glyphosate has produced on literally thousands of non-celiac people. When you mess with the "internal flora" of anything in the whole kingdom of fauna, there's no way of knowing what kind of harm you're not doing. Glyphosate does not predictably "cause cancer" but it does, for sure and certain, aggravate cancer. And arthritis. And multiple sclerosis. And asthma. And sickle-cell anemia. And Lyme Disease. And mononucleosis. And flu, like the Norwalk-type virus that's been ruining this Advent season for my neighborhood. And measles, as in that last news item I retweeted a few minutes ago: 24 deaths and 20 critical-case hospitalizations is not a reaction you'd find to un-aggravated measles in a population the size of Samoa's. And every other ill the flesh is heir to, including mood disorders and thus, arguably, including the misery people feel if they happen to have broken legs while exposed to glyphosate.

https://sustainablepulse.com/2019/12/11/glyphosate-and-roundup-proven-to-disrupt-gut-microbiome-by-inhibiting-shikimate-pathway/

It's a funny thing about me, personally. I'm a lot easier to negotiate with when damages have been limited to me, personally, and not to people who might no longer be in a position to negotiate for themselves. My definition of "people" is not species-specific, either, just as glyphosate's damage has never been species-specific. I'm a lot more likely to stay angry, less likely to forgive, on someone else's behalf than on my own.

So we're talking about animals who've suffered and died, some horribly--or didn't. Regular readers remember more cases (yes, Mogwai's "cat mono" developed overnight into "cat polio" during a glyphosate episode), but I'll limit this discussion to Jenny Wren, who'd built a nest near enough the house that I could look in and see one tiny healthy wren egg before the poisoning episode, and then, the next day, no new egg, and then, the next day, a little irregular lump of calcium in the nest below which Jenny Wren lay dead. That lump was not as big as the end of my finger but, for something that had had to pass through the back end of a wren, it was monstrous. When she fell out of her nest Jenny would have fainted from loss of blood; no cat had touched her body. We are talking about passing a cinderblock through the back end of a man.

I said nothing about either "possible" or "desirable." The idjit asked about compensation.

Then we have to consider the land. The idjit seemed to be tweeting from, spare us all, Australia. The country where glyphosate spraying has been added to other ecological abuses, on top of a naturally warmish and dryish climate, with results reportedly including "flame tornados" sucking fire hoses out of men's hands and burning them. Many people believe that those who've used glyphosate since 2018 are heading for something like a "flame tornado" in the next world, but is it even possible to "compensate" for having contributed to one in this world? Personally I don't even want to think about a "flame tornado," much less about any way those who've contributed to one might compensate.

So let's just say that I don't want to think too much about compensation for those who've sprayed glyphosate on anything. Let's just say that a lot of them are, like that former school groundskeeper in California, already dying, and Bayer should pay whatever their nurses and survivors agree to settle for and shut up, now.

Because I am a Christian, I'll consider--although if this were to have to be negotiated in court I'd think long and think hard--the following gesture of superhuman generosity: If I were the judge, I would consider...letting the glyphosate-addicted farmers live.

I want them to abandon all claims on any land. I want them to have to pay decent, ethical, sustainable farmers a fee per acre to reclaim their land. I want them to be packed into "efficiency apartments" in cities, fed on the poisoned rubbish with which they're clogging food banks across America until it's used up, and forced to do the jobs "U.S. citizens won't" do, for a dollar an hour, to pay for that. I want them to be treated like violent criminals for the rest of their lives, because if people have continued spraying glyphosate since 2018, violent criminals is exactly what they are.


But I would consider giving up the claim to proper compensation, just because the only compensation these fools deserve would be too horrible to think about. Punitive damages should of course be imposed, but don't let any glyphosate farmers get any ideas about any number of millions of dollars amounting to real compensation.

Never in this world or the next will you really have any hope of compensating for the harm you have already done, poisoners. You can hope for pardon, but anything in the way of compensation will be payable from you, to us your victims.

Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter 10: Not Over, but Beyond Chat

Here's the flu-delayed Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter. There will be more of them in the new year, God willing, but they may or may not come out weekly. We are so winning...that the flow of news is actually slowing down!

"
The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published irregularly 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. THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY, AT LAST

Far too many animals (and people) had to suffer while Bayer/Monsanto were allowed to squall for a theoretical explanation of the most obvious fact about glyphosate: Whatever your reactions to this poison have been, they weren’t identical even to your close relatives’ reactions. If you noticed your reactions before someone steered you to a newsletter or web page that explained them, you probably heard “You’re the only one who’s ever reacted to glyphosate THAT way,” and possibly “Are you SURE it’s glyphosate and not something else? Let’s make you sick another hundred times so we can be SURE!”—and you might even have believed the implication that your reaction was “all in your mind.”

It’s not. At least, it’s not in the part of your mind that’s based directly in your brain. Observing how many of our emotional reactions are actually triggered by intestinal reactions, some researchers have described the findings summarized at this link as evidence that part of our minds really are based in our, well, intestines.

https://sustainablepulse.com/2019/12/11/glyphosate-and-roundup-proven-to-disrupt-gut-microbiome-by-inhibiting-shikimate-pathway/

What happens when the “intestinal flora” inside animals, and humans, are unbalanced? A multitude of different things can happen, depending on what the individual’s balance was at the beginning and what’s changed by destroying some of those “flora.” That is how it is, indeed, possible that a poison that doesn’t directly affect any human body process enough to produce one consistent reaction can disrupt the balance of our intestinal flora enough to make us sick in more than a dozen different confirmed ways. That’s why, even if you have one consistent and unmistakable reaction (as celiacs do), you might have other reactions to some glyphosate exposures and not others; it’s why glyphosate may seem to have no effect on one individual, trigger mild allergy reactions in another, upset another’s digestion, lower another’s immunity, make another “sleepy” (with kidney-related narcolepsy), another hyperactive, and yes, if anybody has any kind of slow-growing cancer or susceptibility to cancer, it can really bring out that cancer—in theory any cancer.

I don’t normally hang out with coal miners, but I happened to find a few of them talking about it recently. “I ought to use up the ‘Roundup’ I have, but now that I know it’s going to give me cancer...” These are guys who know how to read, but don’t read if they can avoid it. They trust TV commercials more than they trust web sites. It’s to laugh, or cry...anyway, glyphosate might or might not give any of these men cancer. (Or his wife, children, parents, or the visiting relative from town to whom he gives a bag of vine-ripened poisoned tomatoes.) Glyphosate is probably more likely to kill us in other ways first...but it can promote cancer’s “effort” to kill us, among all those other things, because it doesn’t directly affect anything going on in our own cells. It affects the vegetative lives of all those single-celled organisms that are symbiotic and/or parasitic inside us. And we may not notice that effect at all one day, and it might kill us on another day.

I salute those misleading TV commercials run by sharky ambulance-chasing law firms that probably aren’t offering people their fair share of any class-action suits they’re organizing. If they stop the coal miners poisoning their visiting relatives from town, all to the good!

2. ST. LOUIS: THE BATTLE BEGINS

We need to keep building awareness in St. Louis that Bayer could actually survive, and even grow—providing more and better jobs for Missourians—IF Bayer can break away from the bad old idea of spraying poisons over the land, and move forward into twenty-first-century ways to control “pest” species. Think nanotechnology! Think robots! Bayer could be building robot wasps that kill mosquitoes, not to mention robot edge steamers that kill weeds growing into roads by watering native plants in their proper place, and robot cutworms that clean weeds out of wheat fields. They have the money. They can train and pay the scientists. They can assign Missouri laborers to safer, healthier jobs!

Present at the trial and photographed for public identification was Hugh Grant, the Monsanto decision maker blamed for the original marketing of this poison. Have you ever seen an easier face to hate? Call Central Casting, ask for an evil-looking face; that’s what you’d get.

https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-roundup-cancer-trial-2641553428.html

3. RUSS JENSEN’S GLYPHOSATE AWARENESS PAPER.LI

I can’t blame the Twit known as Russ Jensen for publishing a Paper.li; I was tempted by that venue myself—but I don’t like it.

For one thing, although a Paper.li circulates in the name of some individual or other, individuals don’t actually produce or edit it. Those links are put in by the Paper.li staff (or maybe only their computers) in Liechtenstein. Knowing that e-friends’ “Papers” are actually assembled by bots makes it easier to waste no time reading them.

For another thing...Russ Jensen’s purpose is to market dietary supplement pills. Obviously glyphosate reactions do use up certain nutrients our bodies need, but hello? Supplement pills have to be digested by the parts of our body that are being destroyed by glyphosate, that are passing ordinary food through, churning it up with blood and froth, but not breaking it down? Swallowing supplement pills during a glyphosate reaction guarantees very expensive toilet water and offers us the hope of raising very healthy sewer animals. The pills may or may not dissolve into powder before they land in the toilet, but they’re unlikely to be absorbed into our blood.

There will be a time, eventually, when our bodies are able to absorb nutrients of which glyphosate reactions have depleted us. When that time comes, Russ Jensen’s supplements may help some people, perhaps many people. They are unlikely to help anyone very much now.

I think Russ Jensen probably means well, but there’s no way Glyphosate Awareness can endorse his “Paper.” I wish he’d give it a different name.

4. AUSTRIA, THAILAND, CALIFORNIA: THIRD VERSE SAME AS THE FIRST

Austria, the scene of The Sound of Music, has seen the light and declared a ban on glyphosate. Like so many other places, they’re now being told they won’t be able to enforce the ban. Thailand, likewise. In the U.K. the bans are being declared, but then declared unenforceable, city by city. I’ve lost track.

What’s to be learned? Governments do have some legal right to tell the greedheads who want to continue spraying glyphosate that they’re committing Reckless Endangerment and are subject to fines, prison terms—and personally I’d have no problem with hangings, either. But they don’t have the fortitude to do that on their own. Governments depend on the consent of the governed, whether or not they’re subject to constitutions that include those words. They don’t dare interfere with market forces, whether or not they officially claim to have or want free markets. That’s why, although looking to government for big, fast, symbolic help may appeal to some of us, it’s not enough. All birds need right wings as well as left wings to fly.

We can blame Prez Trump for telling Thailand that they’ll bloodywell (and we do mean bloody well) swallow the poisons U.S. factories spew out, and like’m, if they want exemption from Trump’s tariff. Knowing that the fact that literate people like us despise Trump has consistently been Trump’s, well, trump card, we can despise him as loudly and publicly as we want. Trump won’t care, because he’s been casting himself as a victim of our elitist bigotry since he was half-grown; his supporters won’t care, because they blame everything Obama and the Bushes got wrong on people like us and our elitist bigotry; and we’ll look silly or partisan if, to our denunciations of Trump, we don’t add denunciations of President Obama, on whose watch the dumping of glyphosate directly onto grains, nuts, and beans, between picking and selling, began. And there’s no need to make ourselves look even worse by denying that the fact that we read things printed in English makes us, to some extent, part of an elite class. It does. We are. Deal with it. (And it behooves us to consider that Trump is an old man, and his attitude in that photo is typical of a kind of senile stubbornness that goes with a glyphosate-aggravated mental decline. Instead of saying “Bad, nasty, ugly Trump,” we might try “Poor old Trump, God help him.”)

Some of us have been told that market forces are as huge and uncontrollable as governments. Technically that’s true; if people who hear us say that glyphosate is harmful to them, too, were finding that it’s good for them, we’d have no chance to take control of market forces. But since in fact glyphosate is harmful to everyone, in one or a few of fifteen (or fifty, or hundreds if we count each kind of cancer and each infection separately) different ways...we have information that others can easily prove for themselves, and we own market forces. We’re already in the saddles of horses that are already moving. We need to grab the reins.

4. TWITTER, WHY WE MUST MOVE BEYOND

Twitter denies that anyone’s interfering with the Glyphosate Awareness chat. Hah. The numbers speak. But seriously, Gentle Readers...on Twitter we’ve won already. There is no intelligent debate left. There are a few diehard glyphosate apologists, looking bigger fools by the minute, and a few saboteurs—oh yes I do notice when and where Twitter fouls up—trying to keep us from discussing what youall are showing me we hardly need to discuss any more, not among ourselves, not when (as Twitter tries to make the case these days) we’re having our tweets show up only for one another. The chat’s archives are valuable; the chat is becoming repetitious, redundant, and boring.

Right. We, the global elite class who are fluent enough in English (and in some cases French) to read and write the versions of those languages used on Twitter, know glyphosate is bad. Most of humankind don’t have computers and Internet access and fluency in the key international languages.

We need to stay connected; for that Twitter will help. But in order to guide market forces we need to think of ourselves as...oh, why not teachers, just to avoid the baggage associated with missionaries or military leaders. Each of us is now a teacher. We need to go out into the real world and organize our students, most of whom still don’t use computers and never will.

Do you like my Zazzle postcards? Can you do better ones? (I hope so, because Zazzle’s not really compatible with Firefox. I wanted to do a postcard for each state, but my 2009 laptop whined, “No waaay.”)

https://www.zazzle.com/collections/glyphosate_free_new_year_collection-119411323818420070

You can paste your own hometown winter scenes into postcards, too. And there’s no particular need to limit yourselves to winter holiday postcards. Zazzle pays commissions on sales but Glyphosate Awareness is not a business for profit. You don’t have to limit yourselves to Zazzle.

We need to be talking to people in the real world, face to face, by phone, in holiday card and gift exchanges. Our Tweeps already know glyphosate is bad. Some days I can tell that Twitter is blocking or delaying tweets from the Glyphosate Awareness chat, some days that it’s not...but Twitter is not a battlefield any more. On Twitter it’s (almost) all over but the shouting. We have to raise awareness among people who don’t do Twitter.

More news will break, and I’ll continue to read and share it on Twitter; some of you are doing superb jobs of writing and illustrating it on these beautiful web pages. But we need to be reaching those of our elected officials who either don’t have Twitter accounts, or have Twitter accounts that are sporadically managed by college students. (Postcards are ideal if you’re not going to bump into them in your favorite café.) We need to be reaching those of our relatives who appear to think the computers we got them for Christmas are a new sort of expensive but fashionable-looking place mats. We need to be reaching the spiteful old hags who’ve been promoted to “manager” or “head” of the basically student-labor-type jobs they’ve spent their whole lives doing, and the cab drivers who have advanced degrees but have lost jobs and work authorizations because they don’t speak better English, and, yes, the coal miners.

More printouts will help. Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t writers should keep thinking...a lot of these people don’t read. They know how to read, technically, but they read only when they have to. Bigger print may or may not help. I won’t be able to appreciate some of the other ideas that may work for your people—but we need those, too. Make videos. Build floats and enter parades. Do pre-game shows. Whatever.

Meanwhile, we need to be working on a positive answer to the glyphosate apologists’ one (feeble) argument, “But how else are we going to feed people?” We have the proof that feeding them poisoned food is not going to create a planet with ten billion healthy humans on it. We need to give them visible, tangible, tasty evidence that it’s possible to raise food that is fit for human consumption, enough for eight billion humans who are committed to getting back to two billion, or fewer, in the next generation, to eat.

For many of us that means learning to use and appreciate undervalued foods like chickweed and dandelions. For as many of us as possible, it means raising healthy, glyphosate-free foods—like corn, beans, potatoes and tomatoes—in back yards, window boxes, kitchens. Almost anyone can rear half a dozen tomato plants in half a dozen five-gallon buckets, indoors, and half a dozen plants will meet most households’ tomato needs. Beans are dead easy to raise, too, and good for the soil. Potatoes are easy to raise, and all right-minded children love picking them out of the loose, mulchy garden. When the corporate shills wail about the needs of agriculture, we need to tell them to get their lazy greedhead selves out of the way of people who can feed themselves better than the factory farms ever did or ever will...and the best way to get the point across to them is to hold up a garden fork loaded with potatoes.

The next Newsletter will come out in a New Year. May it be happy and glyphosate-free.

"

Morgan Griffith on FISA

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

"

Griffith Calls for Sanctions in Response to FISA Abuses

Wednesday, December 18, 2019 – Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) issued the following statement after U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court Presiding Judge Rosemary M. Collyer condemned the misconduct regarding surveillance applications into the Trump campaign uncovered by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz:
“The Justice Department’s inspector general found numerous abuses of the FISA process when investigating one of President Trump’s campaign advisers. The FISA court is right to be sharply critical of these abuses. But I believe these abuses call for stronger action.
“We need to be clear. Lawyers who practice in a court are considered ‘officers of the court.’ ‘Officers of the court,’ including James Comey and others, misled the FISA court. During my career practicing law, I found that sanctions imposed by judges on ‘officers of the court’ engaged in misconduct to be the strongest remedies. Such sanctions send a distinct message that misconduct will not be tolerated.
“The Supreme Court has ruled that federal judges have virtually full power in their courtrooms, so the FISA court has the power to sanction. Considering the serious and real abuses of power uncovered by the inspector general’s report, sanctions on the ‘officers of the court’ who perpetrated them not only would be justified but are necessary in order to prevent future abuses.”
"

Tim Kaine Supports Military Families, And...And...

And what else? I asked, reading the e-mail below from U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA).

"

Dear friend,

Today, the Senate passed the 2020 national defense bill. Each year, I'm proud of the bipartisan work that goes into delivering a defense bill that helps protect our country and support our servicemembers.

This year, one of my top priorities was addressing dangerous conditions in military housing, including rodent infestations, mold that made kids sick, lead, and other safety hazards. The final legislation includes two of my amendments to improve oversight and increase protections for military families to ensure they have safe places to live. I'm thankful we could come to a bipartisan consensus in both the Senate and House to pass these reforms and other provisions that are important to the defense community in Virginia.

Here are some of the other priorities I supported that were included in the final defense bill:
• Supports shipbuilding and repair.
• Includes paid family leave for federal employees.
• Authorizes military construction projects throughout Virginia.
• Blocks the President from withdrawing troops from NATO.
• Provides financial relief to civilian federal employees.
• Cleans up dioxin at Bien Hoa Air Base in Vietnam.
• Addresses recurring areas of instability in post-conflict zones.

You can read more about the legislation here >>
I'm so pleased we got this bill across the finish line and I look forward to it being signed into law

Sincerely,

" [signature graphic: Tim Kaine]

Such a nice, bland, unexceptionable description for such a huge, complex bill with so many controversial political ramifications...This web site definitely appreciates the Senator's interest in cleaning up military housing, and this web site also repeats: We need a One Subject At A Time rule for all proposed legislation, in the U.S. Congress and in every individual State's legislature.

Ten Fiscally Conservative Ideas to Address Climate Change

The Premier of Ontario has reportedly asked for “conservative” ideas to address climate change.

https://www.thespec.com/news-story/9764445-help-wanted-ontario-government-seeking-suggestions-to-deal-with-climate-change/

I have no formal qualifications to advise the Premier of Ontario. (U.S. readers, think Governor of California, or maybe Texas.) I studied science at Berea College, where it’s rigorous, but the science I read was psychology. That makes me an ecological maven. I’ve written this post in a bloggy and mavenish tone. People with Ph.D.’s in geology and meteorology and so forth, who are qualified to advise Premiers and Governors, may read it for a laugh. Then they can use this basketful of ideas to do formal studies...

Some Twits wailed that “conservative ideas about climate change” was an oxymoron. I beg to differ. These ideas are “conservative” in the sense that they’re skeptical about global climate change theory, and in the sense that they don’t demand that governments raise taxes and build bigger bureaucracies.

The global warming theory that was publicized ten or twenty years ago is so-o-o over. Apart from being tied to a political agenda for turning the United Nations into a global dictatorship, it was based on the claim that Miami was going to be underwater by 2010. Let us lay that theory to rest beside the impending ice age theory that scared my generation when we were the age of Greta Thunberg.

By “climate change” we also don’t mean weird weather. Weird weather does not represent a pattern of change. “The hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, whatever in – number of years” means similar weatherquirks were taking place forty or a hundred years ago. Weird weather sometimes creates emergencies to which some people out there may be moved to respond, so I retweet and share reports of it, but it’s a separate category from any pattern of human-made climate change.

What I have watched happening, as a pattern over the years, is known as “local warming” or “the greenhouse effect.” It’s destroying the glaciers and arctic wildlife in northern Europe; it’s making cities in the temperate zones death traps in summer. Talk of the greenhouse effect was buried under the panic about global warming theory in the 1990s but, while global warming theory has disproved itself, local warming has been increasing...slowly in big cities where the effect rose faster in the 1960s, more alarmingly in small cities these days.

I live in a forest on one of the hills above the town of Gate City, Virginia, population about 2500. Gate City is about five miles north of the Tennessee border. Kingsport, Tennessee, population about 30,000, is about three miles south of the border; Gate City is sometimes perceived as a suburb of Kingsport. In the 1970s the rule was that the temperature at my home was usually three degrees (Fahrenheit) below the official temperature reported from Kingsport. In the 1980s I observed that the temperature in downtown Kingsport was usually two to five degrees above the official temperature. Last summer I had two opportunities to ride back from Kingsport in the afternoon, by different roads, past businesses that display thermometers. The ride took ten or fifteen minutes; the walk from the paved road to my home might have added ten more. I rode past thermometers showing temperatures in downtown Kingsport that were close to 40 degrees Celsius—98 and 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Then at my home the outdoor thermometer was showing 75 degrees Fahrenheit. We are talking about Code Red days when older or hypertensive people could actually have died from the heat, downtown, while people ten miles away would hardly work up a sweat. This increase in the temperature gap is a cause for concern. And it does seem to be happening all over the world.

Here are my ten ideas about fixing it. Those who may have wondered when I’m going to write that Green Tea Party Manifesto may consider this a draft of it.

1. Make walking fashionable.

New Yorkers walk. Washingtonians walk. Torontonians walk. In the small towns, however, many people think they need to drive distances nobody in a real city would consider risking a car to city traffic for. The primary fear seems to me that if they walk to work or school, they’ll arrive looking less “fresh” than they looked when they left the house. My generation started the trend for walking to work in sport shoes, carrying dress shoes. The young could start a trend for commuting in sweats and shorts, storing a “fresh” suit at the office where they could put it on after washing at least their feet and faces.

I walk. Of the twenty or thirty good reasons for walking the strongest is probably my astigmatism, and reluctance, as long as I can see more than most people do without them, to pay for special glasses. I get constant reminders of the social stigma ignorant people have put on walking, from people who’d do better to thank me for never having smashed a vehicle into theirs. Every time some piece of trash identifies itself as trash with a stupid remark about walking, I feel that I’m enduring persecution for righteousness’ sake. It’s a good feeling though it leaves me with low opinions of my townsfolk.

If we’re going to reverse undesirable climate change, we need to shift the balance of opinion from “Anybody would drive everywhere if they could, so there must be something wrong with people who walk around town” to “We choose to walk because we can, though of course we have to try to be inclusive of those poor old people who have to drive.” It wouldn’t cost much money for local governments to start a trend toward thanking pedestrians. It might help if, for instance, a few elected officials noticed pedestrians (dusty, sweaty, with their hair messed up) in stores and restaurants and boomed, “Please, Sir/Ma’am, won’t you go ahead of me,” or “may I pay for your coffee,” or just “may I take this opportunity to THANK YOU FOR NOT DRIVING! I salute your public spirit!” That’s enough to stop many small-town social bullies; it might be enough, all by itself, to start the trend. If not, a few competitions with cheap trophies or fifty-dollar cash prizes, scholarships, dinner at local restaurants, would probably get the trend going.

We can leave it to the Bright Young Things (like Thunberg) to call the attention of the young to the idea that walking is sexy. For my generation, I’ll say this: The reason why I’ve worn the same dress size since grade nine, and the reason why my Significant Other has fended off diabetes past age 70, is that we get out and walk and move our bodies. If you don’t want to be obese or diabetic, start walking now. (And a country that has a National Health Service could appropriately publicize the thanks of the National Health Service to adults who avoid putting a burden on it.)

2. Keep walking feasible: Don’t herd people into slums in the name of “walkability.”

Slums are not “walkable.” Crowding creates craziness, so nobody needs to hope that just packing newer buildings with more competent people does not amount to constructing slums. If people are subjected to New York, or Hong Kong, or Rio de Janeiro living conditions they will at best start acting like New Yorkers. I think the consensus in Toronto, as in Washington, has always been that the world needs no more of that. Densely populated neighborhoods are too hostile and too hot to be “walkable,” whatever their builders may have fantasized.

So we need to think back to the traditional model of sparsely populated, self-reliant communities where “walkability” meant schools, grocery stores, and home-based businesses within one mile, and offices within five miles, of people’s homes. The Internet can add so much to the transition away from the twentieth century aberration of “zoning for maximum use of motor vehicles.” Most people don’t need to commute every day and, once or twice a week when they do meet or physically exchange goods, most people should be able to walk to most of the places where they do business. Most families should have a choice between one-acre gardens and five-acre mini-farms, around houses where everyone has a room of his or her own, with green space around and between their homes.

How much does government need to do to promote this trend? Probably, just step out of the way. This is the lifestyle “conservatives” want.

3. That means marketing the idea of better lives for fewer and healthier babies.

No, of course nobody wants—or needs—to think about mandatory abortions, or even penalties for those who have too many babies. All government really needs to do is call attention to the advantages of growing up in a one-child home, and the maturing value of being the mother of one child (as opposed to the perhaps irreparable damage done by repeated childbirths). And, perhaps, the idea that the physical consummation of love does not necessarily mean making babies.

4. Also the ideal of a calmer, more bucolic lifestyle.

Where I live a lot of people, if asked why the 1970s “back to the land” movement failed, will answer, “It didn’t.” The first few years of organically farming soil where vicious chemical cycles were going on were unprofitable, but if people were prepared to work through that, every year was better than the one before.

“Going back to the land” failed people who weren’t willing to do it right, like the Sick Greens who, when their water lines didn’t work for them, declared their rebellion against the bourgeois notion of bathing, then shuffled back into town—probably as welfare cheats—with fungus infections, nutrient deficiencies, and often drug-related brain damage. What would have helped them? A good healthy public laugh at the idea that “back to the land” was a counterculture movement for people who rejected hard work, personal hygiene, and similar “conservative” values...when in fact nothing is more “conservative” than a sustainable move “back to the land.”

5. Canada is generally perceived as a cool country, but it has something to crow about if people choose...

Sustainable dry-flush toilets! What a concept! As the home of the Sun-Mar company, Canada leads the world in toilet technology.

I’ve always been glad that, when Associated Content was buying all those “I love my [name-brand product]” pieces, my blog buddy laid claim to “I Love My Sun-Mar Toilet.” But I do. For sheer woo-hoo and yee-haa braggadocio there’s nothing quite like being able to neutralize all the nastiness we and our animal companions inevitably produce, without adding one drop of pollution to what people in Tennessee have to drink. I may not have much respect for a lot of my townsfolk’s opinions, but I am protective of their health. Water-flush toilets are so-o-o over.

6. Solar power is cheap, and could even be made hoardable, if people don’t waste it.

Thomas Friedman and other corporate-brainwashed people have fantasized at length about using electrical power grids to micromanage people’s behavior in their homes. “Conservatives” naturally hate that idea. So, as a conservative alternative, why not market energy independence? In Ontario, in Virginia, in points between those and to the north and south, most people get enough sunshine that a row of solar collectors in a one-acre garden could run the gadgets they really want to use every day—say a small refrigerator (but not a huge deep-freezer for unreliable storage), cooking stove or heater (but not both at the same time), one computer, but they have to make their own acoustic music and set their non-electric clocks by their computer. They could put a Lasko fan near their chair rather than run an air conditioner in summer. Those who really wanted more electricity could plug back into the grid and pay for it...but the utility companies could be required to pay the ones who collected more solar energy than they chose to use. “Conservatives” love basing things on business transactions, especially the kind that are profitable for them. If those big inefficient heat pumps that heat or chill whole houses, while pumping heat into the air, cost money to run, while controlling the climate in only the room where they’re actually working pays “conservatives,” they’ll scale their energy consumption back waaay beyond what Agenda 21 advocates would have demanded.

Solar power is a hard sell anywhere north of Orange County, California, as long as it’s being marketed as “roof-mounted panels, which may trap rain and damage the roof, and won’t lower your bills by enough to pay for themselves in twenty years.” Most places just don’t get enough sunshine to make solar power seem cost-effective—on the terms the corporations and agenda-pushers offer it. But try “Put a row of panels in the garden and tell the greedhead electric company to stick their monthly fees in their ears,” and panels will go up—and heat pumps and air conditioners will go down.

7. Less crowding could eliminate one of the most acrimonious of the current political issues, too.

Few conservatives actually hate, or even dislike, large groups of people (group-thinking does not fit the conservative style), but conservatives have abundant reason to hate the way various "sexual minorities" have been exploited as distractions by the Extreme Left. “Sexual minorities” appear whenever almost any animal species is overcrowded. Nufsed.

8. Less crowding could eliminate the felt need for glyphosate and other “pesticides,” as well.

The argument in favor of spraying poison on food crops is that “It’s the only way we can hope to feed ten billion people.” A better argument would be “Let’s work on getting the world’s population back to sustainable levels.” More individuals living closer to their land can control nuisance species without poisons. Most of North America’s most persistent “weeds” are actually edible. Why poison dandelions when you can eat them? Again government’s role could be to encourage, rather than force, vast fields of “factory-farmed” single crops, cultivated and harvested by machines, to mutate back into small family farms where people appreciate companion planting, crop rotation, and irregular produce.

9. Which could also reduce the risk of fires.

I discovered the Premier’s call for content while browsing someone else’s Twitter page to refresh my mind after last Tuesday’s Glyphosate Awareness chat. I found photos of wildfires in Australia. Funnily enough Australia has been the home of most of the glyphosate apologists who’ve joined the chat.

Yes, there is a connection. Glyphosate is a desiccant. Desiccants dry out plants. Dry plants burn more easily than green ones do. Even when they’re not desiccated by poison, huge fields of one kind of grain in which every individual plant dries out at the same time of year are tinder boxes. However, studies have already quantified the way chemical pesticides promote bigger and more destructive wildfires.

While plants are green, they hold water and resist fire. In much of Ontario, in Virginia, and in most places between, we have certainly had destructive, out-of-control fires...but our fires never reach the appalling sizes of wildfires in California or Australia, because, when there’s a mix of bare earth, dry plants, green plants, and trees in between buildings, fires come to things that won’t burn easily. Deserts, and huge monocropped factory farms, don’t present natural barriers to fire. Today's big news headline from Canada seems to be a recent quantitative analysis of how this is working in British Columbia. It's relevant to the wetter eastern side of the continent too.

10. And about all those other pollutants...

I don’t think plastic has much to do with climate change, actually. I think Soros is funding attention to plastic, and to climate change, by way of distraction from the real problem of glyphosate. But plastic is an ugly mess these days, so why not throw in a few “conservative” thoughts about plastic.

Conservatives have never had a problem with the ideal of tidiness. I remember when right-wingers objected to tax money being used to fund “Sesame Street,” to a kid my age “regressing” far enough to laugh at it whenever I got a chance to watch it, to its being aired at times when right-wing children were supposed to be out in the fresh air.One song from “Sesame Street” I’ve sung all my life builds up to a dynamic climax with the lines, “Making a mess may be all right, and quite a sight to see, but just be quite sure, before you mess things up, that you can CLEAN UP YOUR MESS BEFORE IT MESSES UP ME!” I would have expected some older conservatives to object to the way those lines are written to force singers to yell. They don’t. Some of them scream those words right along with the music. They don’t want the playground, or the ocean, turned into a “grungy glop garden” any more than anyone else does. As Mike Savage puts it, conservation is a deeply conservative idea.

But it looked to me, last week, as if the teachers who still cling to some revised version of the global warming myth are falling down on their job of teaching the real observable facts of conservation to the young. On the Saturday, when it wasn’t raining, there was a holiday parade on Kane Street. Hygienically wrapped candies were distributed to children. On the Sunday and Monday, it rained. I walked down Kane Street on Monday afternoon and, if I took one step without passing a hygienically wrapped candy a child had opened, licked, and dropped on the ground, I did not take two. The side of the street really looked like Candy Land. What happened to all that wasted sugar? It was melting down in the rain already, probably sticking to my shoes. What happened to all the plastic? By now some of it’s already choking fish in Tennessee, or maybe dissolving into the water that people in New Orleans are about to drink. Somebody failed to tell those children that, if you taste a hygienically wrapped candy, and you don’t like it, the purpose of the wrapping is to wrap tightly around it while you put it in your pocket and hold on to it until you get to a proper place to dispose of it.

Littering can be so much easier than tidiness is, at some times and for some people, that government needs to do more than merely verbally endorse tidiness. An idea that worked brilliantly, at no real cost to local government, in Maryland was regular “Clean-Up Days.” At first small prizes were offered to those who picked up the most litter in a certain park. Then, to eliminate any possible incentive to dump litter in some part of the park on a Friday in order to collect more of it on the Saturday, the cash prizes were replaced with free use of rental bicycles or rowboats. How many afternoons I’ve spent rowing up and down the Anacostia River, harpooning stray plastic bags and styrofoam cups, but reflecting that the amount of litter still there to be collected had really dropped to levels that hardly justified the cost of an afternoon’s boating. (Rowing on the Anacostia River has become a pleasant way to spend an afternoon now; in the 1980s, when I first joined “Clean-Up Marches,” nobody could imagine that that would become the case.) Town and neighborhood “Clean-Up Days” could become pleasant outdoor social events in other places too. If it worked on the Anacostia River, it’ll work anywhere.

Tortie Tuesday: Missing Samantha

While I've been offline, we've had Snowstorms, Power Outages, and a Mutant Form of Norwalk Flu. It has not been the most enjoyable week. However, I was not the one who had a Power Outage during the Storms; I'd taken the laptop home, and was even able to do some work on it, in between bolting to the bathroom and collapsing on the bed. Those documents I promised last week have been written...but first I need to mention that Samantha's gone missing.

She was out with Burr. They don't usually go far. It rained. They might have taken shelter in someone's barn or shed, or in the cave. A bear has been observed in the neighborhood. It's been warm enough that a hibernating bear might have been moving about, probably hungry. They might have met the bear.

Or they might have gone to someone's house, and someone might have thought "What a pretty little cat" and trapped her. (That's not a thought people would have about Burr, or a thing Burr would allow to happen; he knows about box traps and staying out of them. But Samantha thinks a box trap is her safe place.) Someone might be putting her up for ransom at a horrible HSUS-type shelter as I type. And although Samantha has become much calmer than she was when I met her, she's still a panic biter; someone might be saying "She's vicious, she can't be 'adopted,' let's kill her now."

Burr is a big strong woodswise animal with more than the usual ability to take care of himself according to his species; I don't worry about his coming and going between houses that he clearly does not regard as homes. Samantha is strong, and she can jump at least six feet straight up in the air, but other than that she's not too good at taking care of herself, because she's always been a Scaredycat. If she's separated from Burr and Serena and me, panic is likely to ensue.

She is a sweet, gentle, affectionate pet when she's not in a panic. She is loved. She is missed, especially by Serena, whose message to the world is "First Traveller, then Stache and Felix, and now my mother! It's not fair! It's not right!" Serena's been growling and threatening everybody, hitting her kittens for no reason, even nipping me; she's spent time in Cat Jail and promised to behave better if released, and done it, but she's not a happy cat.

If you see a small Tortie cat who has never quite grown into her tail, and has to hold it up or curl it under when she walks, with this kind of face...please do not try to feed, "adopt," "rescue," or otherwise confuse her. She needs to come home. If you see a large, ugly-faced, surly-mannered, black-and-white (actually dark gray-and-white) spotted tomcat with a stub of a tail in the same vicinity, please do not try to separate her from him. He is her favorite person in the whole wide world and he does, if she doesn't, remember the way back to her home.

Tortie Tuesday: Samantha's Guide to Holiday Gift Giving

Seriously, Gentle Readers, I the human don't see any evidence that Samantha the Tortie, or any of the other cats in residence, worry about shelter cats.

I have known cats whose behavior could be interpreted that way. Although Heather, shown below...

...was status-conscious enough to give me this reproachful look because I'd photographed another cat first, she was generally a friendly cat. She would look at new foster cats the way she's looking at the camera, and if they accepted it, within a few days they'd be part of her extended family. As she grew older, I tried to encourage her to take the long naps older cats take indoors. At that time Petfinder was compatible with this web site so I could bring the computer home with, occasionally, a shelter cat photo sequence showing. Heather definitely seemed to recognize pictures of cats and other animals. Her reaction to shelter cat pictures was generally benevolent boredom--which is what Queen Cats show to new cats they're willing to tolerate. She never seemed to fall in love with another cat's picture but she did seem more tolerant of cat pictures than of dog pictures.

Then there was Viola the Cybercat, an adorable bouncy-pouncy nuisance who "helped" me write some of those posts about the Virginia legislature in this blog's early years. Viola definitely took an interest in what was on computer screens, if only as something to chase and slap.

Most animals don't seem to connect computer or TV screens with anything, although many seem to see on-screen images well enough to watch video images of the sort of thing they watch in real life. Samantha is in the majority. She snuggles only briefly and occasionally; she does like to be picked up and petted, but has never dozed on my lap. She's never shown any reaction to the laptop, in real life.

Serena is in another minority of anti-electronic animals. She won't stay where she can see a computer screen, even a dark one. She thinks the cell phone camera is for slapping and kicking about.

And Silver and Swimmer are good kittens who do as their mother tells them, so they don't compete for human attention, so they've never snuggled on my lap and looked at a picture on the laptop either. Serena has taught them to follow my rules and come when I call them, but not to snuggle. Once in a while, when I pick one of them up and Serena's not looking, I hear a purr. When Serena's looking, they give me a cat kiss (sniffing the air near my nose) and bounce down and away.

So I can't really say that the cats would like you to remember shelter cats, such as they've been spared from having to be--Samantha literally at the last minute. They would like you to remember them. They would like you to send them truckloads of the fresh and juicy kind of kibble, always the freshest batch, please, in the small packages so it will be fresh all the way through the package. They also like cans of fish; a one-pound tin is about right for one meal for four cats. But I would like those of you who live in places from which it wouldn't make sense to send cat food to me to remember the shelter cats near you.

Although Samantha hated being left alone during her first year at the Cat Sanctuary, she no longer feels alone there, so her preference is probably for the human to have to walk into town and buy premium "natural" kitten chow in one-dollar packages. "Exercise does you good," she's probably purring. Not that she's ever turned up her nose at any kind of kibble; she's not overfed, and, like most predator species including humans, she has that instinct to overeat when there's a chance.

Weather killed the Friday Market last week. I ran out of kibble over the weekend. Bad me. I was also out of cash, waiting for an e-payment to clear a bank. Bad bad bad me. I think the cats could tell that I self-punished. The cats had meals on Friday and Saturday. I had soda pop, rose hips, and chickweed. On Friday a friend treated me to coffee. I don't like drinking coffee on an empty stomach. Drinking coffee while my stomach stayed fairly empty, all weekend, was good for a very gripey weekend. I did not feel fit to be around people, including cats, and the cats seemed very solicitous. Clingy, even. As if they thought the trouble might be that I'd forgotten what friendly companions they are (even if they're too young to snuggle). Some cats whom I've loved, who I've felt loved me back--Heather, Ivy, Mogwai--would have gone off hunting, but these four stuck to me like glue.

I mention this by way of illustration of what's wrong with our high-tech economy. Between Thursday and today I had, in real life, twenty-three cents. I had paid some bills with some of the previous week's earnings, and I'd done some more work and earned some more money, but that was only online money. I had a few hundred dollars that some professional money handlers were hanging on to, to demand some profit on them, while in the real world I couldn't buy even the smallest package of kibble, much less a handful of peanuts.

If the Muslims take over the United States it'll be by upholding their teaching about this, which Moses and Jesus unfortunately failed to spell out, although it's in the Bible, too, if you look closely. The Bible does say other things like "If you take the tools of someone's trade as security on a loan, you shall surely return them to him before sundown"...but Muhammad supposedly enunciated further, "If you hire someone to work, you shall pay him on that day; you shall pay him while the sweat is on his face." Peace be upon him, indeed. The Christian countries should only uphold this kind of humanitarian law as well as the Muslims have done.

So, the payment continues to drag through cyberspace at the pace the money handlers have been allowed to demand. I continue to think grim and bitter thoughts about how we need a law that, when someone has done any kind of work for someone else, if the payment is not in the worker's hands by morning the worker automatically gets the title to the house where whoever has the payment in hand is living...

"Oh, but we need all these extra complications to have a high-tech economy!" Rubbish. If bankers were liable for rent on their homes while they were holding onto our money for fun and profit, they'd miraculously discover that they could convert e-payments to cash in minutes. It could easily be made profitable for bankers to scuttle around delivering e-payments in cash to people's homes, in the evenings, after supper, and it would be good for their bodies and their souls if we did that.

But this was supposed to be about the cats, so can we make it a cute cat post, anyway?

PK: Cats, what do you think it means when someone says "I don't want any presents" for their birthday, holiday, anniversary, or whatever other occasion of celebration? Do they really not want presents?

Serena: Humans certainly give each other some useless objects as presents. Maybe some humans have enough sense to tell each other not to send them things that aren't even very nice to sleep on. Things that smell even worse than all humans naturally smell when they've washed off all the stuff they smear and spray on themselves! Things with nasty little lights on them, that make nasty little noises! Even more outer coats, when they already have closets full! Maybe some humans say "What would I want with those objects? Keep them yourself." Ours always says "Thank you, I'll see if I can sell it in the Friday Market for you."

Samantha: Yes, and then the closet's so full of useless human objects there's no room for a person to bring up kittens in it, even though that's obviously what nature intended closets to be used for. However, humans don't always use words to mean what they seem to mean. Humans have a thing called lying, which is like the way we pretend not to be stalking something when we are, except some of them use it constantly when there is no real use for it. They have a way of saying "I don't want any presents" when they really mean "I do want presents, although I've not found a good one for you, and probably won't find one. I want you to say you're absolutely not going to buy me something just because of some commercial gift-exchange tradition invented by retail stores. Then when the occasion arrives I want you to tell me you couldn't bear not to give me anything. Then I'll say I couldn't bear not to give you something, too, and give you an old dried flower or a cheap fruitcake I didn't even bake, and then I want you to give me a new car."

Swimmer, who is now bigger and older than she was when this picture was taken: They couldn't.

Samantha: Oh yes they could. Some humans are real natural-born liars.

Swimmer: I mean, nobody could possibly want a car!

Serena: Most humans do, though. Ours are very special.

Silver, who is also more of a handful now than she appears to be in this picture: How would we know what humans think, if they don't say what they mean? You're a human. What does it mean to you?

PK: It varies very much from human to human. Part of the variation is that when humans really are young and poor, they really do want a lot of things, but they don't expect their friends to be able to give them what they really want. That's the typical young woman who tells her young man "I don't want a gift," meaning that she knows he can't afford the new car or the diamond she really wants, or at least she doesn't want to have to give him anything of comparable value.

Then there are people like my parents when they were young and reckless. They were serious Bible students who came to believe that the commercial Christmas routine is unchristian, antichristian, and they wanted to opt out of it. They had a lot of rich friends from the church that did celebrate Christmas, though, and even while they were studying all the things that are wrong with the commercial routine, they were frantically shopping for things to exchange with the rich friends who were piling up toys around the Christmas tree higher than my little head. Then, along with some but not all of their friends, they said, "We're opting out of the commercial Christmas gift exchange. We want no more presents." And at the time they meant it. But a few years later, when Mother had given up the "beauty" business where the chemicals were making her ill, and we'd moved back to the farm and put in those first few all-organic crops that barely yielded enough to feed us in the summer, and Dad had one steady odd job that paid the minimum wage for two or three days a month, the people who were still their friends could see that we children needed some presents. So they'd give us things, and our parents would take them, and try to pay their friends back with produce or odd jobs later. For people who have less money than their friends, gift-exchange rituals can be very uncomfortable.

Then there are the people who want to be able to communicate in inside jokes and "hints" and "nuances." They like to say things that aren't true and claim that "anybody" should have known from some little way they pulled their faces, which those of us who have astigmatism don't even see, that they didn't really mean what they said. I don't know about people like that. Some of them seem to like each other, but I certainly don't like that kind of behavior. As a Christian I believe that "for every idle word we speak, we shall render account." If I say something that's meant to be funny rather than true, like one of those slang phrases Google hates because they sound violent--"We went to a comedy club and the stand-up act killed us," meaning "killed the inhibitions some people used to have about laughing out loud," meaning we were screaming and slapping our knees with laughter--I'm accountable to God for making sure the people to whom I say that recognize that it's a joke, and are smiling. If there's any way they could possibly think it's true, then I have to say what I mean. (Amazon link should go to the classic song with the refrain, "Do what they say, say what they mean,'cos one thing leads to another.")

I think people who tell their friends they don't want presents probably do want presents. I also think it would be very good for those people if all their friends agreed to take what they said literally. It might break that nasty habit of saying things they don't mean, before they can mislead other people about something that might be more serious.

If someone says "I don't want a present" to you, Gentle Readers, please don't give them one. Please send the money to a worthwhile charity like ADRA or Heifer, or use it to adopt or foster a shelter animal, in that person's name. That person needs to see a "thank you card" from the charity, probably just a digital image in the e-mail, instead of a present. If the person really meant "I know you can't afford to buy me a refrigerator, which is what I'd really like, but I will be disappointed if you don't at least buy me some sort of 'thoughtful' sentimental cheap gift like a flower, book, or souvenir shirt," then that's what the person should say, next year.

For what it's worth, Gentle Readers, I honestly don't want any more small affordable objects from people who don't feel that what I've done for them is a fair exchange for something like a refrigerator, a new roof, or--I've been dreading this moment a long time, and I still dread it, but it's come--a minivan I can use to haul merchandise to markets and also pay back some of the older friends who've done so much driving for me. I have masses of shirts, jeans in every size, a closet full of dresses. I always enjoy reading new books, but I have books by the barrel and the yard, so it'd have to be a very new or rare book, or one I've lost and been trying to replace, to be really appreciated. About all I buy is food and, because of glyphosate, I'm very unadventurous and very picky-choosy about what I'm willing even to taste.

What I would like would be for youall to buy some of the mathoms I've been trying to sell in the Friday Market. Yes, they are mathoms. That's J.R.R. Tolkien's and Suzette Haden Elgin's lovely word for objects that look as if their only imaginable purpose was being circulated and recirculated in gift-giving rituals. The "six-month anniversary party" decorations for babies, the cheap model cars that aren't especially good replicas of any real car ever built...There is actually a good use for these things, if you're rich enough to take the time to itemize your taxes. You can buy them from me, ask for a receipt, then donate them to a place like Mountain Treasures, ask them for a receipt, then report that you donated X amount worth of goods for resale to a local 501(c)(3) charity.

I was in Mountain Treasures yesterday. I found some books I've not read yet, that I would have bought if I'd had any cash on me, growl gripe grumble. I also found their book and audio music collections looking pretty picked-over. Books are not mathoms, but you're free to use the books I've displayed in the Friday Market as if they were. I recognized some books I sold in the Friday Market, last summer and the summer before, being recirculated. This is good; helps people discover older writers. Buy, read, and donate liberally. That kind of "liberality" is what I want for Christmas.

----

This post is long enough already, but for real-world readers let's mention: When I say "the mathoms" I include the old magazines and color calendars I offer for kids' art classes to cut up--the pretty, glossy ones--but not the Reader's Digests. Those are special. I don't know how many of the living people who remember George Peters' "marked-up" books and magazines, or even remember their parents circulating those, are still able to read Reader's Digest. Some people do. When those people have been in the market they've bought the issues I had on display. I have about two-thirds of a cubic yard more of them. The deal with these battered, scribbled-on back issues is that, for thirty or forty years, a small group of people, maybe a hundred or fewer altogether, used to pay for George Peters' comments on books, magazines, and newspapers. He was the ordained un-preacher whose insights added value to current events--the pre-Internet equivalent of one of the really great bloggers from whom people choose to get their news and "inspiration." Well, these Digests are some of the last things he "marked up" before he went blind and switched to the FacTape ministry. I've read through each one, and its comments. They're not his most insightful work; I think they were meant for family members who already knew what he was saying with some of the short comments. And his handwriting was deteriorating. And he used then-current slang and abbreviations. But for those who do remember one of Gate City's most lucid and original thinkers, they're still treasure. Even without the comments, Reader's Digest is a wonderful museum of pop culture...sort of the pre-Internet blog site. I never ask why people are buying what they are buying, but it would be a tragic mistake to think those Reader's Digests are mathoms. Nephews should be proud to claim kinship with the man who "marked up" those magazines.

Why E-Mail Should Come from the Business Name

Dear Brittany, dear Alan, dear whatever generic name you're using...

Possibly you think that having e-mail show up as originating from someone with a given name only will cause that e-mail to be mistaken for personal messages from family members. Not in my family it won't. We all know better than to use the Internet for personal messages. E-mail is public and should originate from an office, even if it's located in somebody's garage.

As a result, where a mass-mailed "newsletter" from a web site with a reasonable organizational name like "Institute for Responsible Technology" or "Townhall" or "Daily Kos" or even "Cracked," and a headline like "Trump attacks Fox News," would at least go into the Bacon Folder...a mass-mailed "newsletter" from what appears to be somebody's given name looks like SPAM.

I have tried to check these things, and delete those spammy-looking e-mails without reporting them as spam when they come from a legitimate but misguided nonprofit organization. However, spammers aaalllways use what appear to be individuals' given names, so you shouldn't count either on (1) people taking the time to "hover" over your e-mail address so your organization's name will pop up, or (2) that feature of Yahoo e-mail working every time (it's never been reliable).

Just use your organization's name, already. Or, if a lot of people have already blocked your organization and you're trying to sneak your messages around their spam filters...take a hint, and use your complete screen names at least. Trust me: Everyone in the United States knows half a dozen people called "Brittany" and probably two or three dozen people called "Alan," and most of them are too young to be using the Internet and the others are old enough to know that a screen name should either sound like the full real-world name of some hypothetical person (but not anyone in your neighborhood) or else like the kind of product or message with which it's associated.

("But 'Daily Kos' doesn't sound like anything..." Well, it does; to those of us who've been online for ten or twenty years it sounds like the name of the leftist group blog to which the Daily Blaze was an answer. Each group took a joke and turned it into a brand. Most e-mail from The Daily Kos is bacon, but not spam. But if Daily Kos, or Daily Blaze, writers--and I do sometimes read both--were to start sending out e-mail from "Dave" or "Lyn," those e-mails would definitely look like spam.)

Morgan Griffith Stands with Hong Kong

(Status update: Oh, we've had Snowstorms & Power Outages! Actually very little of the snow actually stuck to any surfaces I could see, except an occasional moving car that had been parked on the other side of the county. And the power outages were deliberately planned by a big-chain tree trimming company, apparently following orders to mow down all the trees near all the power lines in the whole county while they're here. Efforts to blame the inconvenience on "the storm" sounded funny when, at the time my lights went off, the weather outside was sunny and warm. That's what having utilities connected to a "grid" does for people. There was no physical reason whatsoever why anyone in Gate City, which got a little rain but nothing that could be described as any kind of storm, should have lost a minute of computer time--yet some of us lost days. In my own particular case, if the tree trimmers had asked me rather than a company office in Ohio, they could have taken a few more big trees just waiting for a chance to fall on a power line, while I was here on my job, without causing me a bit of trouble...and one of those trees is in prime condition, solid hardwood most of the way up, and ought to be worth some money...to a local tree trimmer, because now those Yankees have annoyed me. Anyway, I'm back.)

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

"
Monday, December 2, 2019 –                                
Hong Kong: How We Got Here
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation."
These words of President Ronald Reagan come to mind when I observe events in Hong Kong today. The people of that territory in East Asia, which came under the sovereignty of China less than a generation ago, are now fighting to keep alive the freedom they have known.
Hong Kong possesses a unique status in China, rooted in its history.
In 1842, the British Empire formally took control of the island of Hong Kong. Parts of the surrounding territory came into its possession as well through the nineteenth century. Some of these areas, the New Territories, were leased from China for a 99-year period under an agreement ratified in 1898.
During the period of British rule, Hong Kong blossomed as an important port and financial center. Further, it was governed by Western-style institutions and practices, giving it an identity distinct from mainland China.
Refugees often flocked to the area, especially residents of China fleeing Japanese invaders in the 1930s and the Chinese civil war between Nationalists and Communists following World War II.
In the 1980s, nearing the end of the 99-year lease for the New Territories, the British and Chinese governments negotiated the cession of Hong Kong in its entirety back to China. The Joint Declaration they signed in 1984 established the model of “one country, two systems.”
While China would exercise sovereignty over the territory beginning in 1997, Hong Kong would retain considerable autonomy over its laws as well as its free market system. It would have its own judiciary and legal system.
Essentially, Hong Kong would be able to keep the things that had made it thrive.
Many hoped that the incorporation of a prosperous, free area into China and letting it keep its rules would provide an example for that country. The Communist mainland could see the benefits that Hong Kong enjoyed thanks to its government and market economy.
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister who had negotiated the Joint Declaration, expressed this view as her country prepared to turn over Hong Kong to China:

Chinese people will come to Hong Kong, they'll see and they'll say why is it different, and what is the difference? It is the same people, the same talents, but here there is a rule of law founded on the belief that each and every person matters in personal lives.

Unfortunately, in the years since China assumed control over Hong Kong, that hope has not been realized.
Instead, China’s Communist oligarchic rulers have sought to bring the territory more thoroughly under their thumb.
Earlier this year, a bill was introduced in Hong Kong’s legislative body to permit extradition to mainland China. It would encroach on Hong Kong’s independence, potentially allowing China to target political dissidents and deprive residents of the rights they enjoy.
Thousands of people took to the streets in protest. The object of their movement grew beyond the specifics of the extradition bill. They were standing up for their rights.
China responded by cracking down on the protestors, with police using tear gas and rubber bullets, and even live ammunition on a few occasions. It threatens to acquire the political domination over Hong Kong it wants by force.
The history of Communist rule in China suggests this is no idle threat.
The Communist oligarchs invaded Tibet in 1950 and brutally put down an uprising there in 1959. Their suppression of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 shocked the world; the number of people they killed has never been established for sure. In our time, they detain individuals of the Uighur ethnic minority in concentration camps.
The people of Hong Kong deserve America’s support as they stand up for democracy. When the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019, which would hold China accountable for its actions, I voted for it. President Trump signed the bill into law on November 27.
From our own experience, we know the value of the timeless principles of liberty. Hong Kong knows this, too, and we should stand with them in their contest for freedom.
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.
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