Animals
It's not so much a planned hoax as a piece of confusion. There was an epidemic of honeybee colony collapses. It's over; honeybees were saved, for the time being. Now disgruntled activists on behalf of wild bees grumble that honeybees are mere pets, even invasive in North America, and don't need saving; it's native bees that are currently believed to be threatened with extinction. So enjoy this satirical post, with video, about the honeybee crisis, but don't confuse it with the current danger to the wild bees that pollinate our native plants.
Glyphosate Awareness
Hands up if you remember seeing "autism" in the news and "Roundup" in the ads in the same year. Right, now hands up if you weren't born yet in that year...for me it was 1983 or 1984.
Green
True Greens follow our own rules. Poison Greens...
History
What's happening here? What can we learn? Well...I too used to like going to K-Mart. I wasn't looking for car parts or bric-a-brac, didn't look at the clothes, and quickly learned to avoid the lunch counter, but there were things I looked for. I collect paper dolls; K-Mart always had the cheap, popular books, until they stopped stocking paper doll books. I wrote on 8--1/2 x 11" narrow-ruled notebook paper; K-Mart had good prices on that, until they stopped stocking it. I bought the yarn for some of my first knitting projects at K-Mart, before they stopped having a yarn department. K-Mart was not serious about quality control and tended just to die when Wal-Mart moved into a location nearby, but they stopped stocking the things that did work, after a fashion, for the people who bought them, to make room for more of the cheap clothes that nobody I knew would ever have bought. If you insist on trying to sell new off-the-rack clothes in a place where there is any respectable charity store at all, even if it's only Goodwill, they need to be good off-the-rack clothes. I mean to say, who's going to pay $20 for a jacket that will lose its buttons when washed, when you can pay $2 for a recent or vintage Saks suit? To sell new off-the-rack clothes you need to be Saks. Lots of students used to enjoy K-Mart, but that chain died of a felo-de-se.
I think my favorite K-Mart moment was the pair of shoes I bought there in 1989. They pretended to be a proper shoe store. You slipped on a floor model shoe over your socks, walked up and down the aisle, then bought a box that were supposed to be the same size. I spotted a brand and color I liked, bought the box that was supposed to be my size, took it home...well, the sizes of the shoes in the box averaged out to the size number on the box. One was two sizes too big, and one was two sizes too small. I was still living in Takoma Park so I showed everyone the shoes, rolled my eyes, and said "Only in Rockville!" But I've often wondered whether the other pair of shoes that were the mirror image of that pair was sold in a K-Mart in Montana. The quality control was sooo bad.
Hurricane Helene
The body counts are in now and, by several measures of awfulness, including number of human lives lost directly to the storm, Hurricane Camille still holds the reocrd--but Helene came very close to that record. Immediate needs for junk have been pretty well supplied, though hurricane survivors would probably accept any new cars or diamond rings people might want to send. Some families may still need to rent or buy trailers to live in while restoring their homes. Mostly, it seems, they just need money, like everyone else only moreso.
I'm not sure about that man. He's reporting live, what's going on in and around him; it's not that. I think he's in shock. "Call back in a month" is a good idea. "Tractor-trailers full of drywall" is seriously a good thing to plan on donating, even if he does trail off into that hopeless hysterical laugh. He's in pain. Who wouldn't be? And I've seen that kind of pain before. In Clinchport. "We just want to make sure it can never happen again..." and hold out our hands for federal funding, and the federal government's way to help you make sure it can never happen again is to grab your land and gut your town. I think he needs to get some perspective. This is not "the new reality of climate change." This is a once-in-five-hundred-years freak hurricane. Connecticut had a hurricane in the 1950s. Eastern Virginia had Camille. There was the big blow along the Carolina coast in the 1890s, the Johnstown flood...we've actually had storms worse than either Camille or Katrina. These things don't recur every year. In the case of Clinchport, the town did need to move up off the flood plain, but the feds sent most of them to a retirement project and turned the downtown area into a park, and you know where that's going when they run out of money for all these boondoggles. If you want a town, North Carolina neighbors, do not go to the Fed and do not put too much faith in speculations about "climate change." Rivers that don't normally flood may need to be separated from houses just in case they do, but don't let the land grabbers eviscerate your town.
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