Business Trends
Automated scanners at "self-check-out" stands prove to be a very bad idea for stores. I don't believe, as the writer suggests, that people want to talk to a human cashier--there are plenty of humans roaming around the self-check-out stands at stores that have made this mistake in my part of the world, peering over people's shoulders and making them more likely to make mistakes, decide not to buy things after all, go back through the regular checkout line, or, it seems, take it out of the peerers-over-shoulders by challenging themselves to cheat the machines. I believe people want entry-level jobs to available to minimally skilled workers. I have to wonder how many of those increasing numbers of shoplifters are unemployed, desperate ex-cashiers...who do have more of a grievance against the stores than other people have.
I think stores do need a major retraining, perhaps replacement, program to replace yappy, unscrupulous cashiers who play the chatter-cheat game with quiet, conscientious, math-talented cashiers who speak only when they're spoken to, are grateful when they're not spoken to, and are motivated to get every single transcation right. I know I miss the days when it was the math-heads, not the cheerleaders, who were hired and promoted by big-chain stores,a nd I'd feel a lot better shopping at stores that hired more math-heads. Nervous little girls with thick glasses who want to be wives and mothers, not engineers, are my favorite kind of cashier. Foreign ones who know how to say "Thank you" and "I call manager" and maybe "I can speak French" are the next best kind.
I think they could do with monitors that would blare out automatically, sparing customers the trouble: "YOU spoke before YOU were spoken to! BAD cashier. SHUT YOUR MOUTH UNTIL YOU'RE ASKED TO SPEAK, and DON'T try to cheat OUR CUSTOMERS!" And if they don't detect the cashier saying "thank you," loud and clear, the monitor would blare that out, and a board would pop out and spank the cashier. But I don't think replacing cashiers with scanners, which are short-lived and unreliable machines, is a solution. I think replacing the cashiers' scanners with regular cash registers might be more cost-effective. The nature of all electronic devices is to break down, but scanners seem more fragile than boom boxes or laptop computers. (And those are fragile, Heaven knows...)
COVID
Oohhh! Ooohhhh! This round of COVID is serious after all! Fauci's got it!
Yeah right, and if he gets into an ordinary hospital where people who aren't super-rich celebrities go and gets an extra dose of meds with nasty side effects just to stop him calling for help, the Chief Beagle Torturer would jollywell deserve it. I'm not saying it should happen. I'm not saying hospitals should be that way. I am saying that Fauci's getting that treatment would have a kind of cosmic rightness about it that your cranky ninety-year-old neighbor's getting that treatment does not have. Go and visit her now--this web site will wait.
I honestly don't know whether I've had this round of COVID and it was worse than all the previous strains of COVID, or whether a New Roundup spray poisoning reactivated symptoms of COVID along with all the other grief it inflicted. I know I was ill during the first week of August and haven't felt well since. I know symptoms have included that distinctive COVID cough. I know that one of the poisons in New Roundup causes pseudo-cardiac symptoms, for me, that are more dramatic than COVID pericarditis. I know I've spent my life practicing non-Type-A behavior and am not naturally hypertensive, so waking up with blood pressure spiking and pulse slamming, having to meditate to get my pulse and blood pressure down so I can sleep, is definitely an indication of something wrong. Some people just live with that and take pills for it, or at least live with it and take pills long enough to make a transition into a non-Type-A lifestyle. For them that's normal. For me it's not. I walk, I meditate, I sing, I pray, I laugh out loud, I'm not a vegetarian but I don't eat animal-derived products every day or even in every week, and since the cafe closed I've even cut way back on caffeine. COVID is making its rounds and once again I've been one of the first to notice symptoms, but I didn't even do one of those home tests for the virus. If a lot of New Roundup had blown my way, that could explain it.
The Monsanto-Bayer corporation is like "Weasels of the world, unite" so it's been hard for the average person to keep track of their crooked sales strategies, which they've paid the "Trusted News Initiative" participants (censored papers and broadcasts that aren't worth a glance any more) not to report. "Roundup" became a popular brand when it was the trademark for almost pure glyphosate mixed with a few other chemicals the company claimed were "inactive" as preservatives and that trademark light, grassy-or-maybe-slightly-bleachy, fast-fading scent. (The scent added to Roundup has been studied and reported to be toxic.) No more. Now the "Roundup" brand has fissioned into different formulas marketed for "lawn care" (NOBODY NEEDS ANY SPRAY POISON FOR "LAWN CARE"!) and for farm use. I've not seen what's in the version sold in garden stores; it's said to be milder, reflecting the reality that suburban lawns don't need spray poisoning, at all, ever. The version sold to farmers is more toxic, reflecting the reality that while glyphosate has made thousands if not millions of us "Spoonies" who never know how bad our chronic health problems are going to be today, it's been losing its effectiveness by breeding more resistant pest species. Glyphosate breeds kudzu, breeds jimsonweed, breeds Spanish Needles. So New Roundup is a mix of five poisons. Not everyone is sensitive to all of them and it's rare for two people to have the same reaction to glyphosate, which is still in New Roundup, but a large number of people will be able to relate to "measles and mononucleosis and food poisoning" as a description of how they or someone they know reacts to New Roundup for farm use. Or, if they're younger, "conjunctivitis ("pink eye") and Long COVID and food poisoning."
Does COVID linger in the body and flare up under stress after the original infection has run its course, and become "chronic," like mononucleosis? It does. Can it be reactivated by New Roundup? I know of no reason to doubt that it can. Would it still be contagious? Chronic mononucleosis is still contagious. Neither chronic mononucleosis nor Long COVID is much of a threat to most people because most people are immune to both diseases anyway, but I don't kiss people I like, I don't drink directly from cups in my favorite cafe...because you never know.
Active practitioners of medicine might want to stop listening to the Chief Beagle Torturer's "me-me-me and my old rich 'gay' White male friends" routine, and consider the role chemical poisoning is theoretically very likely to play in reactivating COVID as a source of pain and a drain on productivity.
I don't know whether it's possible that one person to whom I spoke, before becoming ill, could have been a COVID carrier, or whether I and other people in my town woke up with resurgent COVID because of exposure to New Roundup vapors. I think it's very likely that our resurgence of COVID was triggered by spray poisoning.
In which case, being fully vaccinated would be likely to do more harm than good.
And it can happen again, and again, and again, and again, until we have enough sense to ban all spray poisoning and strictly limit any use of non-spray "pesticides." Until we have enough sense to enact legislation that specifically says, "Because of the vile and criminal ways chemical companies have fought the facts about profitable products such as 'Roundup,' all use of 'pesticides; must be limited to professional environmental science specialists who pay a six-figure annual licensing fee and must be done on the ground by trained teams of workers sealed in haz-mat suits." Until we have enough sense to require the news media that will emerge from the ashes of the "Trusted News Initiative" to print all verified reports of hazards of any popular product, whatsoever, as front-page headlines, and tolerate no censorship on behalf of sponsors whose products turn out to be hazardous. Until we have truly repented, and made restitution to survivors and to the Earth, for the whole horrible history of glyphosate.
Trans in the News
Right. This web site has nothing but sympathy and good wishes for people born with genuinely mixed-up chromosomes, and although atrazine's not my issue I do recommend that people read the horrible facts about atrazine before they judge people who have fully male chromosomes but have been "feminized" by exposure to this chemical. Even if, in a licensed, regulated, consensual prize fight between trained boxers, they beat up women who become trained boxers. You train to be a prizefighter, you accept that eventually you're going to get beaten up. (Though yes, it might be fun to watch Mike Tyson beat up the "trans women" boxers who've caused so much knicker-twisting this summer. I'd watch that. I'm not a fan of boxing but I like seeing people my age beat the young in contests of strength.)
But we do recommend, for adults only, Joan Aiken's novel Last Movement, and for those who have any remaining interest in the idea of a father being "feminized" while his children are growing up, here are some new, fact-based stories in which some of the characters aren't as nice as the poster trans folk from whom Aiken drew her character James-Kerry.
This web site has received reports that the Olympic women's boxing champion was not "trans," but one of those people with genuinely mixed-up chromosomes, after all. If so, I apologize, and it would show maturity and class if Tyson did too.
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