Books
Gentle Readers, I am...guessing that other contributors to The Dog Who Wooed at the World did not realize that we can write reviews of the stories we did not contribute to this book, excluding our own stories from consideration, on all the review sites. Why is mine the only review on Goodreads? I realize that a lot of people don't do Library Thing and that Bookshop and Bookbub don't have pages set up for this book, but Goodreads is for everybody. Here's the link. It's a long book full of stories that deserve to be savored... even so, people need to see lots of reviews in time to buy enough copies for everyone who needs this book for Christmas.
Flowers
Compact, informative, pretty video about the purple passion flower, which allegedly blooms around the time of Passion/Easter celebrations, I don't know, maybe in Florida? Here it blooms much later. Anyway it has, like shamrocks or clover, dogwood and redbud, had a Christian story spun around it but I always forget the story. More arcane and less logical than the others mentioned. The video presents it as just a quirky native plant that may grow well, even too well, in your not-a-lawn; those wacky flowers that turn into edible fruits.
I could've done without the paid message from Bernie Sanders that played after the video, but you may not see that, so here's the link. Is Trump "dangerous to democracy"? How much harm did he do to democracy as President, relative to how much Biden's done? Trump is a politician, trying to align himself with advocates of freedom of speech, clean food, small business, right to work, and lower taxes without committing to any of our goals, limiting his promises to what party bosses apparently believe are the "safe" because endless and tedious bickering about abortion and gun bans. And always bashing those awful immigrants--like his grandfather--what was old Opa Drumpf like at home? Trump is very hard to like...but mercy, the alternative is even harder. And more of a threat to democracy.
Scott Adams' Rumble ramblings, this week, have included a riff on how D party bosses have redefined "democracy" to mean the totalitarian bureaucracy they want, rather than the actual idea of government of, by, and for the people. He didn't have a link for that but it does seem to describe the party's behavior. This makes D party bosses a direct threat to American Democracy. Not that people like my Aunt Dotty, who was a D because in the early twentieth century some Rs opposed married women's right even to have paid jobs, or Thomas Sowell, who publicly stated that he'd never support the party that harbored segregationists in the 1960s, really are threats to American Democracy. They embody it at its best and are the salt of the earth. Rs, Ls, Gs, and yes I's too, should only hope to do as much for American Democracy as either my Aunt Dotty or Dr. Sowell have done. But in their name American Democracy can and will be further undermined, certainly not restored, if the electorate are really stupid enough to trust Mean Girl O'Dowdypants to protect us all from hurtful speech and malinformation, which is factually accurate information that contradicts the party line, such as "Being vaccinated against the strain of COVID you've already had will not immunize you to the strain that hits your neighborhood after you've had the vaccine." Dowdypants wants to make repeating that accurate statement of fact an excuse for Paypal to steal your hard-earned e-money, which makes me very glad I got all of my e-money out of Paypal. Trump is not actually making a commitment to make Paypal pay triple if they've ever dipped into a customer's account, nor to define individuals' use of the Internet as a personal effect that may not be searched without a warrant, but he is trying to appeal to people who want those things done. Definitely the lesser of the available evils. Vote for Trump, as early on the morning of Election Day as possible, to prevent unscrupulous people from voting for Tackypants in your name.
Glyphosate Awareness
It's inescapable, Gentle Readers. Do we need more links? It's everywhere we go in real life. I went to Wal-Mart this week and got stuck behind a wheelchair shopper. You know how people waddle through Wal-Mart with their big wide carts and park themselves side by side in an aisle, blocking traffic, and tell everyone waiting behind them all the details of their personal lives. Wheelchair shoppers are worse because the wheelchair carts are wider. And what this wheelchair shopper was saying, while I was looking for tomcat odor remover behind the wheelchair cart, was "have some more tests because I have never p'd pure blood like that before." Apparently the contents of the little cup were not just streaked or clouded with red, but were solid red. In real life I am not the sort of awful person who actually barges up to a wheelchair user who is in the act of sharing all per confidential medical history with the crowd of strangers moving through a popular aisle in Wal-Mart, braying "What's your diagnosis, and what do you know about any possible connection with glyphosate?". In cyberspace I'm not above writing about this kind of thing.
And then we stopped at someone's house where television was being watched, and the television was blaring, "Gritty eyes may be a symptom of Graves' Disease. If you have Graves' Disease you need to see a different doctor from the one you've been seeing about your Thyroid-Eye Disease." Gritty eyes may be a symptom of various gruesome eye and other diseases, and early detection may improve the chances of people who have those diseases. But what gritty eyes are, this year, that's made the complaint so much more common and added the advertisements for eye conditions to the ads for drugs that may or may not relieve the symptom of a spastic bleeding colon, is the most noticeable reaction people have to New Roundup. We need to be asking doctors to check for correlations between increases in almost any symptom, including symptoms of mental and learning disorders, and large-scale outdoor poison spraying especially along road verges. We need to demand that they check tissue samples, in any chronic condition that involves bleeding, for correlations between levels of glyphosate and levels of blood.
Two things can happen when your reaction to glyphosate (or some other sprayed poison) mimics a disorder like Graves' Disease or Crohn's Disease or cancer. One is that there are actual objective tests for the disease, and those tests will reveal that you have the disease, at an early stage while it's still treatable. The other is that a doctor may say in authoritative tones, "It's not a typical case but it is Parkinson's Disease," and prescribe useless or harmful medication for a disease you never actually had instead of correctly diagnosing your glyphosate reaction. You may need--and it's not fair, it's not right, you're the patient and you don't feel like being an activist for Heaven's sake--to keep a logbook of your symptoms and your exposure to glyphosate or any other sprayed chemicals. And half the time neither you, nor the laborer steering the motorized roadside spraying device, know which chemicals you're being exposed to. And you might have a major reaction when nobody's sprayed poison in your neighborhood because you indulged in a delicious dish of celery or spinach or fresh peaches, all of which absorb poison vapors from the air when farmers "protect their crops" by spraying adjacent fields. You might have a horrific reaction to a contaminated vaccine that injected glyphosate directly into your blood, where it could cause symptoms you've not had before. But we must, for the sake of humankind, document all of these atrocities. You wouldn't let someone tell you that just passively allowing your insane neighbor to tear strips off your face was acceptable, so why would you let them tell you the same thing with regard to strips being torn off your insides?
There may be some other cause. There may be people whose bleeding is triggered by something else and not by glyphosate. That would be useful information to have. It would also be new and surprising.
Do we need legislation mandating an extra payment from anyone who's engaged in gaslighting about these things? "It wouldn't be the chemicals, because there's nothing in the medical journals about the chemicals. Let's do this painful, invasive, expensive test for this form of cancer that's normally found in only one out of a hundred thousand people in some part of the world where none of your ancestors ever lived." When patient-driven studies have shown that it is the chemicals, we could go back and require that doctor to make that patient wealthy.
Anyway. Yes. Another link. Note that this is a news item, not a medical study, and the reporters include information that strongly suggests that this particular reaction is to glyphosate and something else affecting this geographically limited group of patients. There are people who like to lump New Brunswick and Nova Scotia together with Newfoundland and insinuate that everyone up there has some sort of brain damage, anyway, you can tell because they live there. Nevertheless...
In related news...
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