Hot Enough for You? What You Can Do

As mentioned in the heated debate below, when you use a flatphone or tablet or anything "cloud-based," you're not necessarily using a huge "data center"--but you're using a "data center" and feeding the alleged demand for bigger ones where more evil data mining will be done, assuming anyone survives  the damage they do to the land and the environment. Especially the warming. Do you really want all your future summers to be hotter than this one? I don't. It's not been a terribly hot summer; it's not even ninety degrees this afternoon, anywhere but downtown, but it's been quite hot enough for me. 

The thinking is that existing "data centers," which are already using too much water and electricity and space, generating too much warming, and probably costing more jobs than they generate after the building stage, won't be enough to handle all the data Microsoft wants people to store in "the cloud," so either we turn the fertile fields of Ohio into deserts of toxic waste or we hand all our data to China. 

An alternative is being intentionally ignored here. We can...just...correct a misstep, and move briskly forward, without putting any data into "the cloud." We can demand private, personal data storage on our own computers, out of reach from any other point in cyberspace, or no computers at all. That is not what Microsoft wants, nor is it what Microsoft investor Donald Trump thinks he wants, because instead of selling new computers it will revive a demand to keep on using older computers at least until the corporations roll out new ones that meet the older standards. But if we think more than five years ahead--which may be difficult at Trump's age, but should be easier for his heirs--it's a total win-win. Less waste, more functional computers, we get to keep the Internet, and if China wants to let its ruling party destroy resources it badly needs to solidify its tyrannical control over its people, we let China find out for itself that that's a bad plan...and may even be able to help China pick up the pieces after its crash.

For a start we can stop feeding the monster in our attempts to fight it...using flatphones or tablets to go online, using plagiarism programs like ChatGPT to generate memes about climate  change...

https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2026/08/28/byop-i-just-coined-that/

Meanwhile,  over at dVerse, David Ben Alexander achieved a seadna in English. 

https://skepticskaddish.com/2026/08/13/gone-with-the-breeze-or-words-like-these/

A seadna (presumably pronounced "SHAH-dna") is one of those old Celtic verse forms that aren't usually attempted in English. It has lots of rules:  For each stanza, lines have to alternate between 8 and 7 syllables, no exceptions. (Doable.) Lines 1 and 3 must rhyme with each other, as must lines 2 and 4. (Right.) The last word of lne 3 must also rhyme with an "important" word somewhere in line 4. The last syllable of line 1 must alliterate with the first stressed syllable in line 2. The last word of line 4 must alliterate with an "important" word just before it, and the more "internal rhyme" within and between lines 3 and 4, the better. (I am now officially lost.) So far, all seadnas written in English have expressed primarily the thought "Look, I solved this puzzle!", but in theory someday someone may write a really good one.

Here is a bit of Bad Poetry inspired by the seadna form. As you may observe, although it's almost impossible to force English words into the correct form, if you just relax and use as much internal rhyme and alliteration as possible attempts at seadnas in English can be sort of fun...and if you ban all things "cloud-based" from your life, you can take away the basis for the claim that we need to follow China down into Tech Inferno.

Future summers' weather hotter,

Heavier than this summer's was,

Thirst amidst a waste of water:

First thing those flatphones can cause.

China thinks "need data chewer"?

China thought they needed Mao.

China thinks change can secure

Pure data? Who knows how?

China's junk is sinking, flaming!

Typhoon on the China Sea!

We see rich men (no names naming)

Claim the whole world's bound to be

Chained to China in pollution,

Wasting all our good green Earth;

Cry for fission, fracking, fusion,

"For pollution boosts wealth's worth."

Friends don't let friends use the flatphone!

Microsoft? Just bar the door!

Of China's bad ideas that one's

Outshone all that failed before.

There will be no cloud-based Internet for me. If you call yourself Green, there shouldn't be for you, either. Take that flatphone back to the store. See if they'll give you a refund.

Book Review: Insects Do the Strangest Things

Title: Insects Do the Strangest Things

Author: Leonora & Arthur Hornblow

Date: 1968

Publisher Random House

ISBN: none

Length: 60 pages

Illustrations: color drawings by Michael K. Frith

Quote: "The dragonfly does not look like a dragon. It does not look like a fly. It looks like a pretty little airplane."

This book has no introduction. It hardly needs one. The first paragraph is typical of what's in Insects Do the Strangest Things: fun facts about insects, written to challenge primary school readers.

Children of all ages (as well as adults) like fun facts, so this book and its companions, Birds Do the Strangest Things and Fish Do the Strangest Things, may be good choices for older readers as well. They're excellent choices for older siblings who like, or can be persuaded, to read aloud to preschoolers.

At the time of publication, this book also deserved commendation for not encouraging children to kill moths, butterflies, and beetles for their collections. As I recall, all the other nature books I had at this time, if they mentioned insects other than honeybees, told us how to kill the insects and display the bodies. It's possible for country children to acquire an impressive collection of moths and butterflies without killing anything, but now even no-kill collections are out of fashion because their popularity encouraged people to kill too many specimens that should have been allowed to live and multiply.

However, before sharing this book with children, parents may want to make up their minds about the ethics involved in filling a bottle with fireflies to use as a lamp. (When we read this book, my parents asked my brother and me how we would like to be trapped in a bottle.)

Insects Do the Strangest Things also encourages children to try keeping a praying mantis as a pet. This is definitely preferable to trying to control nuisance insects with poison sprays, which damage the environment and may cause allergies and/or build up toxicity in humans. Mantids, like their biological "cousins" in the roach and cricket families, often seem completely unafraid of humans. They can be trained to approach a human and beg for food treats. Bold, cleverer than many insects but none too bright, some of them even seem to enjoy having their backs stroked. Unlike roaches and crickets, mantids eat only other living insects, so they don't spread diseases...but parents may want to make a decision before a child decides to want a mantis for a pet.

Mantis egg cases are often sold for organic pest control. They work best if the eggs are kept at natural light and temperature conditions, in a safe place from which the baby mantids can move right back outdoors as soon as they hatch. Mantis hatchlings don't just eat the eggshells; if not exposed to other prey fast they'll eat each other.

A fun fact not discussed in the chapter on dragonflies is that some species of dragonflies, as well as mantids and paper wasps, like to be around humans because they eat all the insects that annoy humans. The old superstition that dragonflies will use their needle-shaped bodies to sew up someone's ears or nose may have started when people observed how often dragonflies perch on a human's ear or nose. Although few humans enjoy being perched on by dragonflies, the dragonflies do this in order to catch and eat flies, gnats, and mosquitoes.

Most of the insects discussed in this book are harmless, enjoyable species, but the book does discuss flies, mosquitoes, ants, and fleas (although technically fleas aren't insects). Neutrality is maintained. The Hornblows leave it up to parents to tell children whether spraying insects is ever justifiable.

However, enjoying the fun facts in Insects Do the Strangest Things may be a good preparation for a Green child to grow up interested in encouraging insect predators rather than trying to poison insects.

Book Review: Small Wonder

Title: Small Wonder

Author: Barbara Kingsolver 

Author's web page: http://www.kingsolver.com/

Date: 2002

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-050406-2

Length: 264 pages plus foreword and acknowledgments

Illustrations: drawings by Paul Mirocha

Quote: "I began this book, without exactly knowing I was doing so, on September 12, 2001."

After the physical attacks by Al-Qaeda on September 11 came the long siege of emotional terrorism by People Who Are Part of the Problem (Without Knowing It), which began, in the newspapers, on September 12. It was a weird season for writers. Even comedy writers were asked to write about The Tragedies, not because they had anything to say that anyone else didn't know, but so that certain newspapers could print All September 11 All The Time.

The emotion I remember feeling in the last third of the year 2001 was irritation. So much that was being said and written about the situation in the United States, or even in Washington, showed such total ignorance about what the people I knew were actually thinking, feeling, doing.

Real memories: The autumn of 2001 was beautiful, with day after day of picture-perfect weather. Grass had grown over the graves where my father had been buried in January and my husband's brother in November. Cormorants moved into the Anacostia Waterfront Park. Some creep mailed anthrax culture to a few personal enemies at the same time that a nasty strep infection was going through the D.C. schools. Despite strep throat my husband and I went to Stitches Fair and Knit Out.

Some reverberations from The Tragedies did reach us. We turned down a trip to Ireland because the airlines had become so tiresome. We discussed a Caribbean cruise, then ended up actually going to a memorial service for a friend who died of cancer in California. First we laughed at W Bush's advice to patriotic Americans to spend money ("What did you do in the War on Terrorism, Daddy?" "I charged!"), and then we did some serious thinking and writing about the benefits of buying locally produced items, which did not include the China-made flags other people were buying.

Barbara Olson, whose books I'd cited in research writing, was on one of the planes that were hijacked. That was sad, but the losses of personal friends and relatives and the well-earned success of another friend's book (the book parties started in January) took up more of our emotional energy.

I mention this because it resonates with some of the essays in Small Wonder. Kingsolver was not a newspaper wage slave obliged to crank out a certain number of words about yesterday's headlines before breakfast. She had lots of things to say that other people were not saying. She was writing about pollution and conservation, wildlife and child life, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, being a successful novelist, foreign aid, national parks, pesticides, the "locavore" eating plan, going to Japan, the Columbine tragedy. She mentions in Small Wonder that she felt only about as sad, when John Kennedy (junior) died, as she imagined Caroline Kennedy would have felt if a member of the Kingsolver family had died. And some people were outraged. How dare people be more emotionally involved with their own lives than with the public events blaring out of the TV.

The four "September 11" essays in Small Wonder are, to my mind, dreadful...but then all of them were. They were products of a very bad idea: the idea of cheapening the real grief and anguish some people were feeling by ramming phony anguish down the nation's throats until mass nausea set in.

The other essays in Small Wonder are Green and/or literary. They contain some opinions I don't support, but they also contain so many useful facts and quotes that I bought this book for reference purposes anyway. The natural history pieces are beautiful.

There is one inexcusable mistake in this book. Kingsolver is a native of Kentucky. After living in the West for several years, she moved to Virginia. She doesn't want to name the town in Small Wonder. I won't name it either, although I know which town it is...but it's not Appalachia. In Kentucky "Appalachia" may mean the mountainous half of the state, but in Virginia it is the name of one particular town. Kingsolver has been here long enough to know.

There is also some very good writing, research, and thinking in this book. There is, for example, the discussion of genetic modification on pages 93-108. I've read longer and shorter, older and newer, essays on this topic. From time to time I've even contemplated writing one. I remain unconvinced that a better essay on genetic modification can be written. If you've not made a study of this topic, Small Wonder is an excellent place to begin.

I completely agree with Kingsolver on genetic modification. I completely disagree with her on the place of cats in our ecology. So I can tell you that it's possible to enjoy her writing even if you're reading it to use her facts for the purpose of further research intended to refute her interpretation of the facts. Small Wonder and this writer's other books are recommended to anyone who is not frightened by numbers and who appreciates a well-rounded, realistic, humanitarian approach to science.

Top Ten Things to Know Before Visiting My Small Town

My small town is Gate City, Virginia. People most often visit because they have relatives or friends here. Some other reasons to visit Gate City include camping at the Natural Tunnel State Park, hiking in the Jefferson National Forest, musical performances at the Carter Fold, NASCAR races at nearby Bristol (which fills up enough that race fans feel lucky to find rooms only thirty miles away), work for or with the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, and generally exploring the scenic Appalachian Mountain region. If you are visiting for this kind of reason, knowing these ten things will help you not to seem outrageously less informed than those who are visiting friends and relatives.

1. Gate City is not even within walking distance from Appalachia.

The Appalachian Mountains were named for people who lived further south and called themselves Apalachee or Appalatchi. People who live in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, or north Georgia usually pronounce the third syllable like "latch." People living further away from the name's point of origin pronounce it more like "laysh." In many places the whole mountain region may be called Appalachia without causing confusion. 

In Virginia, however, Appalachia is the name of one specific town, and it's more than thirty miles away from Gate City. (People who live in one town might organize car pools to the other town, but not every week, or every month.) Traditionally Gate City enjoyed a more stable economy, though the difference has narrowed considerably within my lifetime. Appalachia was a mining town, while Gate City was a farm-and-market town with some small factories.

2. Downtown Gate City is a model of a walkable community. 

People don't have to live packed in on top of each other to have a "walkable" downtown. People with mailing addresses in Gate City may live ten or more miles away from the town's business district. Once in the business district, most people can walk from any point in "downtown" Gate City to any other point in ten or fifteen minutes. 

3. Though Gate City is not a model of wheelchair accessibility, people can and do roll through town in wheelchairs. 

Drivers should be careful to show courtesy to a vibrant wheelchair-using community who whir on battery-powered chairs and carts along the main streets of town  Not all stores and restaurants have smooth, wide doorways or fully accessible restrooms, but people will usually help anyone who needs help. Respect for our elders includes making things accessible to people with mobility challenges.

4. What "Blue Devils" really means is "students preparing to go to Duke or a similar big-name university." So, yes, you might see a T-shirt advertising that the wearer "still prays"...and, though it's not been advertised on the same shirt, for our "Devils." 

Two separate traditions face off here:

(a) The "blue devils" of alarm and despondency plagued English-speaking people as early as the sixteenth century. In the 1910s, during the war, the name "Blue Devils" was given to a group of fighter pilots and planes. Admiration for the pilots led to Duke University and other schools nicknaming their athletic teams "Blue Devils." High school teams were usually named in honor of university teams. So the Gate City Blue Devils are a football team that have, historically, bagged far more than their fair share of state trophies. Relatively little "satanic panic" has been generated by this traditional name.

(b) Voluntary, often student-led, prayer and Bible study has often been tolerated on campus until someone complained. Most people in Gate City identify as Christians; many attend evangelical churches and feel, or try to become, comfortable praying and leading Bible studies in any social context. During one incident the American Civil Liberties Union told student prayer warriors that an appropriate way to proclaim their faith at a public school might be "on a T-shirt." The intention might have been to stifle effusions of religious fervor; if so, it failed. Someone promptly designed rather attractive T-shirts advertising "Gate City: I Still Pray in Jesus' Name." 

Most religious teachers agree that it's not appropriate to pray that the Blue Devils win games, but it is appropriate to pray for a good, safe, fair game where nobody gets hurt and all college-bound Blue Devils get their chances to qualify for athletic scholarships.

5. The Devil's Bathtub is a naturally formed, deep pool in a mountain stream. 

The place was named before the team was. People who embarrassed Gate City High School by performing badly in competitions--e.g. forgetting all about a school competition in the excitement of getting something of real importance done at home--were traditionally punished by scolding and shunning, not by being thrown into the Devil's Bathtub. Anyway, competent swimmers who dive into the Devil's Bathtub in warm weather usually pop out feeling refreshed. But it is deep enough, with enough current and rocks, that a non-swimmer might be able to drown.

6. The Tour de Possum Creek was a serious bicycle race that many people enjoyed for many years, but it's no longer staged today. Maps of the course are still available for those who want to cycle 43 miles including a long climb. 

Possum Creek is the stream that flows along the other side of the Clinch Mountain, in a pretty rural neighborhood called Yuma. (Somebody had been to Yuma, Arizona, and liked the name.) It meanders along a nice smooth course in between farms, churches, and country stores, for much of the way but does feature about half a mile of heavy pedalling. Events associated with the Tour also included a half-course race for less serious cyclists and a six-mile "Family Fun Ride," for "Little Possums," between family-friendly restaurants. 

7. People who keep horses still don't like possums. 

Possums are awesome. They can and do eat ticks--though ticks are hardly their favorite thing and I often do find dog ticks within a few feet of the resident possum's den. They are more likely to eat roaches, including the wood and palmetto roaches that nibble on old wooden houses in damp weather. They do love to clean out cats' litter pits and eat things the cats catch and then don't want to eat, themselves. Although possums eat dung and carrion and can carry disease germs for short distances, their peculiarly slow metabolism and low body temperature kill most virus and bacteria. Most people avoid getting close to possums; therefore very few diseases are spread among people by possums. (Possums are, for example, probably the least likely of wild animals to spread rabies.) 

Most possums don't want to get close to humans any more than humans want to get close to them. A normal possum has about fifty teeth. If you try to pick up a possum the animal may sink every one of those teeth into you...though possums really do collapse into a comalike state, showing minimal vital signs, when they're scared and the possum might seem to have "died of fright" before you touched it, especially if it was in a trap. 

However, if everyone in the family, including cats and dogs, allows a possum to clean up nasty messes in peace, possums can become friends. You don't have to touch an animal to bond with it. Possums aren't very clever or entertaining animals but they do learn to come and go on call, and they can completely eliminate the most unpleasant part of routine cat ownership. 

Horsey people, however, will never forgive possums for one thing the little animals can't help: there is one parasitic infection they do spread--to horses--and it's fatal. If you keep horses, you never feel safe keeping a possum.

8. Raccoons, bears, coyotes, and rattlesnakes really don't mix well with humans. Most other wild animals, however, do. 

If you stay long enough in a place where most wildlife have adapted to coexist with humans, you too may have an unforgettable relationship with an unusual animal--a "personal moth" who feels safe in your woodbin, a wren who nests on your front porch, a neighbor's horse who comes to lean over the fence for a friendly visit every evening. Bonding with a spider is not a sign of desperate loneliness or even heavy drinking. It can be an indication that you were able to recognize one of the local spider species that naturally live in a near-symbiotic relationship with humans.

It's not unusual to meet a deer, wild turkey, or stray chicken on the street in my town.  I wish it were still unusual to meet a bear--but it's not really. 

9. You can tap maple trees and make maple syrup in the South, too. 

In Vermont and Canada, maple sap rises in March. Here, it rises in the February thaw--some years, even in the January thaw. The proportion of sap to syrup is still ridiculously high. You have to boil off the water in about 40 gallons of sap to get about a pint of thick maple syrup. 

All maple species yield usable syrup. Ironically, sugar maples were rated the best because they tend to produce syrup and sugar that taste least "maple-y," most like white sugar. People who buy maple syrup now tend to prefer a more "maple-y" flavor.

However, maple syrup never became a major local tradition here because boiling down sorghum syrup was a more efficient way to get a sweet taste. There is a local beekeeping tradition, too, although I often wonder how many of the people who display bee-motif "country" decor items had the fortitude to talk to our local beekeeper when he was alive. (Beekeeping was traditionally a hobby for weird old men and we had one who filled the bill.) 

10  Most people don't know what they have till it's gone. 

A surprising number of people in Gate City are denatured humans who don't know one useful herb from another. You don't have to know what natural richness is in and around this little town to live here, have family here, or belong here. But it would be nice if more people did.

Book Review: Nature's Echo

Title: Nature's Echo

Author: Thomas Crowther

Date: 2026 (today!)

Publisher: Harper 

ISBN: 978-1-4002-5070-7

Quote: "I had been injected with a powerful shot of nocebo (the opposite of placebo), so the idea that I had been envenomated was enough to trigger a physiological response that matched the symptoms of a venomous bite."

In the opening chapter of this book, Thomas Crowther describes the experience of picking up a snake he was told was harmless. When the snake actually managed to bite him, someone told him it was venomous after all. His hand began to feel ominously numb as he was rushed to a hospital. At the hospital he was assured that the snake was the harmless one his friend had first identified it as being. Sensation returned to his hand--it was sore from having been bumped against things to measure its numbness.

Harmless snakes can do significant temporary damage--some bites are hard enough to crack a small bone in a hand or wrist--so this is not a story about foolish naivete. As Crowther ranges on through all the favorite theories and speculations of the New Age sciency crowd, evolution, quarks, spirals, etc., it takes some time to identify the theme in this book, but that theme is, primarily, the idea that many things in nature follow feedback loops. Undesirable things aggravate each other. "Pesticide" sprays aggravate the imbalance monocropped fields create, destroy predators, and allow harmless nuisances like corn earworms to explode into major pest status. Desirable things enhance each other. Seeing good results from a diet and exercise plan motivates dieters to work their programs for even better results. And so on.

Several details and side points in this book will activate the mental rubbish detectors of many readers of this web site. Some details even made me laugh. I wondered if Crowther appreciated the irony of writing about socioeconomic "inequalities" as a problem while being funded by the World Economic Forum, a group who aren't doing much about the feedback loops that bounce wealth back to them. I chortled, reading sections about global warming, after Al Gore has just told us that it may have been that old ice age of our youth that we need to worry about, after all. This book is Green, but not True Green.

Partly that's because of the writer's self-admitted limitations. This book deals with science topics but it doesn't read like a science book--neither the mass of numbers in a professional science article, nor the summaries with just a few well-chosen numbers in a really well written popular science book by someone like Oliver Sacks. Crowther admits that that's because his learning disabilities made it hard for him to do rigorous science experiments on his own, so a sympathetic teacher let him get credit for observing the results of experiments while others crunched the numbers. No woman would get a science degree that way, I'm sure. Crowther seems to read science and study nature in the informal, observational, anecdotal way I do as a non-scientist, but it's never occurred to me to call myself a scientist. (It has occurred to me to go back to university and do the work to become one.) It's not "feminization" so what's the word for that kind of effect on the sciences?

On the individual scientist, the effect is plain. Crowther accepts other people's conclusions, including Michael Mann's "hockey stick" climate change graph, which Steve Milloy has been so gleefully debunking for so long. He's not an idiot, his learning disabilities do not include autism, but he can be used as a "useful idiot" by WEF.

Nevertheless, the book is hopeful and plausible. His sponsors have warned him, Crowther admits, that only big (preferably global) government can be considered as a solution to the problem of global warming. Still, feedback loops mean that choosing a vegan meal might start a loop that could do something toward saving the planet. Crowther has been steered away from studying the problem of "pesticide" residues that make vegan meals so toxic for so many people these days. He has also seen some examples of individuals' efforts expanding outward into feedback loops that he thinks are helping the Earth. 

When he's reporting what he's seen, as he does toward the end of this book, rather than regurgitating theories, as he does toward the beginning, Crowther is a competent writer. Overall this book is a pleasant read. Not essential, not True Green, but fun.

Wal-Mart, What's in the Corn?

"Roundup Ready" corn, I was glad to learn, is a stupid mistake of the past. One of the most deservingly detested GMO crops of all time, this strain of corn was produced by splicing genes from Escherichia coli, bacteria often blamed for "food poisoning," into corn so that the corn plant survives heavy spraying with glyphosate. 

How was it possible not to know that this was a bad idea?

In the 1990s US-based Monsanto held a patent on glyphosate. However, the first "Roundup Ready" corn was tested overseas, on poorer people who had less legal recourse than US citizens. The corporation knew the corn was likely to make people sick. Well, it did. E. coli is more often fatal to a larger minority of the population than COVID-19 ever was. The company kept testing, sickening whole towns in the Philippines and elsewhere, until they found a strain of E. coli that seemed relatively weak. The genetically modified corn was then drenched in glyphosate from before planting right up to harvest time, and it made people sick, though usually not as acutely as E. coli itself did. 

So-called corn allergies weren't common before the 1990s. They became common in the 2010s, when the original patent expired and chemical manufacturers were selling glyphosate at competitive prices. Most of the "allergies" were probably glyphosate sensitivity. By 2020, food producers were looking for corn that was neither sprayed with glyphosate nor bioengineered to be sprayed with glyphosate. Corn-based foods became relatively safe to eat. Southerners rejoiced that we could safely make cornbread with Martha White, White Lily, and similar beloved corn meal brands, once again. Those of us who were gluten-intolerant (probably fewer than a tenth as many Americans as went gluten-free and found that not eating glyphosate-soaked wheat relieved their chronic conditions) were getting tired of rice being the only grain we could eat, and started buying canned and frozen corn again. Because stores had had a hard time selling canned corn in the 2010s, it had become very economical. 

A large amount of the corn raised in the United States is still Roundup-Ready and still treated with glyphosate. It was so treated even when Bayer, which now owns Monsanto, released a glyphosate-free brand of "Roundup" herbicide spray "for farm use." In 2024 and 2025 customer complaints caused the formula for this chemical disaster to be changed. Some small farmers, unaware of the changes, bought Roundup-Ready corn, sprayed it with Roundup, and got a small part of what they deserved as the glyphosate-tolerant plants died of exposure to diquat, dicamba, or other poisons. This year, bitter clingers are getting their glyphosate back, and we must all try to laugh when they describe their wives and daughters giving birth to babies with useless eye stalks flopping out of bare sockets in little bare skulls. 

(One of my cat Silver's Seralini kittens was born like that. Mercifully it never breathed. I pickled it in alcohol with the intention of exhibiting it in the Friday Market that summer; the next strain of COVID kept the market from reopening and eventually I burned the body.) 

Those still clinging to glyphosate know by now that even the US government has agreed that the stuff promotes cancer and aggravates just about every chronic condition known to humankind, including the ones that ought to be fully controllable by merely modifying our lifestyle in such a way as to give up all social eating for as long as we live. They know, although they may try to pretend otherwise. The more arrogantly they bray about "the (outdated, disproven) science," the more certain we can be that they know. They deserve no pity. Real farmers, who have been struggling to do without glyphosate and other poisons since at least 2018 or 2020, deserve sympathy and support, as do the old people who are now dying from cancer after years of trying to believe that glyphosate was safe and effective and the symptoms they had after spraying it were unimportant, but the bitter clingers to glyphosate deserve to be denied treatment when they develop cancer.

But the corn monocroppers are clinging, and they are getting away with it, because the majority of the corn grown in the US is either not used as food for humans, or else processed in ways that seem to eliminate most glyphosate residues. Before it has soaked into plants or plant parts glyphosate is pathetically soluble, easily washed into the water supply where it does no "good" to the lazy farmer after just a little shower of rain; when corn is made into high-fructose corn syrup or monosodium glutamate, those processes apparently get rid of the glyphosate inside the kernels.

Photo from New York Animal Agriculture Coalition, by way of Google.

Corn meal is made from "field" corn, which is less sweet than "sweet" corn even when fresh. Hard corn ("field" corn or popcorn) is not usually eaten fresh, because everyone would rather eat sweet corn on the cob. Hard corn contains niacytin, a "bound" form of niacin that should in theory be nutritious but isn't. Niacytin not only fails to be digested as niacin but makes it harder for the body to digest niacin from other sources. Traditionally Southerners loved our cornbread because corn, unlike wheat, grows well in the South and because most of us got enough niacin from other sources that the niacytin was not a problem. By the twentieth century, however, severe niacin deficiencies were appearing in poor people who ate cornbread alone or with cheaper, fattier, less nutritious meat. A campaign was launched to sell the idea that cornbread should always be made with at least half wheat flour, to reduce the niacytin content and add digestible niacin to the bread. 

Researchers now know that an even better way to use hard corn is to process the dry, hard corn kernels in ways called "nixtamalization," which break down and unbind the niacytin. Traditional nixtamalization involved soaking dried corn in a mix of water and wood ashes, which loosened the outer layers of the kernels and produced grits. 

Sweet corn, however, needs little processing. In addition to containing more sugar, sweet corn contains a rich variety--and variety is the word, because the mix varies widely among different ears of corn, but in any case there's a lot--of B-vitamins, including niacin, not niacytin. 

I started mixing Wal-Mart's store brand of canned corn with canned beans and peas. This added variety, fibre, and flavor to what I'd been eating through most of the 2010s, which was rice, onions, and garlic, and sometimes for variety rice, garlic, and onions. Not all beans were safe to eat after 2020; garbanzos, which I particularly liked before 2010, were especially likely to contain glyphosate residues, even if the beans hadn't been sprayed themselves, probably because they were raised in between crops of wheat, in glyphosate-saturated soil. Being a walking glyphosate detector, I found that Bush's pinto beans were reliably safe, as were Bush's butter beans. Black beans and crowder peas were less reliable. Wal-Mart's store brand of green peas, pinto beans, corn, and tomatoes seemed glyphosate-free, or close enough not to trigger my hair-trigger reactions. 

Various combinations of any of these legumes with corn and/or tomatoes and/or some sort of meat made satisfactory meals for me between 2021 and 2025. The corn could be store-brand canned corn, or cornbread made with Martha White or White Lily corn meal, or corn chips. (The Wal-Marts near me all stocked both brands' "self-rising corn meal," with salt and baking powder added, and "self-rising corn meal mix," with salt, baking powder, and a generous share of white wheat flour added. In practice, people who have learned to distrust wheat usually snapped up the wheat-free corn meal so that, nine times out of ten, I didn't find it on the shelf.) I usually bought a case of a dozen cans of canned corn and one or two bags of chips on each shopping trip to Wal-Mart and felt that that yielded a good mix of hard and sweet corn in the diet. I also bought vitamin supplements with all the B-vitamins.

But in 2025 I started to notice that after eating Wal-Mart's canned corn, my tongue felt sore and swollen. That is, of course, an early warning sign of a B-vitamin deficiency or imbalance, including niacin deficiency...if it becomes chronic. But it didn't become chronic. Nor did the vitamin supplements affect the symptom. My tongue, and mouth generally, felt irritated for about twelve hours after eating the canned corn--not at other times. Drinking water helped. Vitamin supplements didn't help.

Regretfully, I stopped buying the canned sweet corn and replaced it with more cornbread (other stores did better at keeping wheat-free corn meal on their shelves). Cornbread with a can of chicken chunks drained in around the edges of the pan, and a can of pinto beans and a can of tomatoes warmed on top of the bread, makes a delicious panada, everyone I ever feed agreed. Children love the sweet undertaste in a bowl of cornbread and milk. Corn chips also soak up the juices from the canned goods, and/or whatever raw vegetables go into a taco salad, in a satisfactory way.

But the last couple of times I've done a taco salad with Wal-Mart's store brand corn chips, the "Original" kind that look like Fritos, I've had the tongue and mouth irritation. I didn't have it before. And don't try to tell me it's because I've eaten too many corn chips in the last five years--I may have done that, but the "White Corn Tortilla" chips did not have the same effect, nor did the cornbread made with Martha White corn meal. What's being sprayed on the corn, Wal-Mart? 

* * * * * 

A primer on why we never need to spray anything on corn...Corn was actually the first crop that rebounded when my family broke the Vicious Pesticide Cycle. Strawberries were close behind.

This is how we eliminate weeds from cornfields. It costs about $15 at Tractor Supply Company. Cheaper and more expensive versions are available, there and at most other hardware stores or department stores that have a garden department--including Wal-Mart.

(Photo from Walgreens by way of Google.) This is how we eliminate corn earworms. We can buy knee-high stockings or use the washed foot ends of laddered tights. We tie the foot part of the stocking around the bottom of the developing ear of corn. When the baby corn earworm tries to gnaw its way in through the corn shucks, it gets a mouthful of nylon and decides to go somewhere else. Its chances of starving or being eaten by a bird, or wasp, or bigger insect along the way are high. Although aggressive (not strong enough to do any damage to a human, it will bite and kick with all its puny might when picked up; it will also eat another corn earworm if it can) the corn earworm has no effective defense against predators, and would never have been much of a nuisance to farmers had the farmers not fallen into a Vicious Pesticide Cycle that destroyed the corn earworm's natural predators.

(Photo from Wikipedia.) This is how we eliminate corn borers (cobworms). All of these little beetles, and a few dozen other species, can be called ladybirds, ladybeetles, or ladybugs, because monks who noticed how useful they were in the garden dedicated the whole genus to Our Lady Mary, the Mother of Jesus. (You can identify the one plant-eating species in the family, the Mexican Bean Beetle, because it is yellow-green instead of orange, amber, or red.) Ladybeetles and their larvae are best known for eating aphids but they eat other nuisance insects too, if the other insects are small enough, which corn borers are. Stop poisoning your insects and watch your corn borers disappear.

(Photo from the Audubon Society by way of Google.) This is how we eliminate corn cutworms. They like to hang around near my home so I think of them mostly as mosquito eaters, but they'll take just about anything to feed their babies, which often happen to hatch at the time of year when corn is vulnerable to cutworms. (The one photographed above appears to be bringing home a beetle--not a ladybird, possibly a Soldier, Net-winged, or Burying Beetle.) Lots of other birds like cutworms, too. Again, stop poisoning the insects and watch the cutworms disappear.

And when we eliminate the borers, we automatically get rid of the worst kind of fungus that infests corn, too...although glyphosate actually promotes the growth of human-toxic Fusarium mold.

Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate

(This week's Petfinder Post will appear on Thursday.)

I've been mulling this since the news of Trump's loathsome executive order slowing the natural disappearance of glyphosate, which is no longer even considered effective as an "herbicide," due to the inevitable Vicious Pesticide Cycle, and is now known to feed harmful fungi and disease bacteria even though it has an "antibiotic" effect on several neutral or benign bacteria, from the Earth...

I think Glyphosate Awareness has entered a new era.

We've seen that every responsible researcher has come to accept that, if not a primary carcinogen, glyphosate certainly and obviously is a powerful pro-cancer factor.

We've seen that glyphosate predictably harms people each of us knows personally--people who are not motivated by money or politics or conformism or even that syndrome where a certain percentage of medical students tell the school clinicians they think they've got every condition their classes have studied. Glyphosate does not have a distinctive taste or scent of its own, so people usually don't know when they've been exposed until their reactions set in. People don't always even recognize when they are having reactions that are obvious to observers; their obvious reactions feature mental symptoms and they think their anxiety, depression, anger, or stupidity are perfectly reasonable, until the reaction passes. Although not everyone has an obvious physical reaction to glyphosate, by now the statistical odds of anyone not knowing a person who has such a reaction are minute. Most of us have a close relative who has been systematically tortured by these reactions since 2009. Many of us have a close relative who has been killed by them. 

We've seen that, while politicians clearly motivated by money are trying to dig up old whines about the poor pitiful farmers who can't raise crops without glyphosate, the fact is that "organic" farmers--even though their crop yields per acre are lower in weight--are producing crops that don't make people sick, are earning some small amount of profit more years than not, are keeping their land, and are, if anything, healthier and likely to live longer than city dwellers, while chemical farm workers' life expectancy is...I said "little more than half" of organic farmers', recently, on X. It was revealing. The actual figures are, with some variation among sources, 48 or 49 years for immigrant laborers who are more often used to handle pesticides because that group includes less educated and more desperate people, 50 to 58 for native-born chemical farm workers, and 75 to 85 for organic farmers. You can reasonably say that 58 is a lot more than half of 75 but the self-styled "farmers" didn't make that sort of reasonable quibble. They tweeted as if they thought that confusing activists with words, confusing the average age of present-time workers with their average life expectancy, and throwing in the odd verbal attack, would keep them happily profiteering on alleged "food" that makes people sick for another twenty years.

They are not debating ideas in order to learn facts and make informed decisions. They are intentionally harassing people who present facts.

It's time to stop talking to these people. 

Really stop talking to them.

What I'm actually calling for, let me make this absolutely clear, is nonviolent, Amish-style shunning.

When an Amish person sins against any of the church's multitude of rules--from murder to wilful persistence in wearing or using something that doesn't fit into the group's uniform--other Amish people stop talking to that person. 

Person's spouse may move back in with per parents.

Person is not served or waited on if person enters an Amish-owned business.

Person's business no longer exists, as far as the Amish community are concerned. Non-Amish people who persist in trading with the person being shunned, if any, may be warned that the business is not really Amish.

Usually an Amish person who gets this treatment is on per knees, weeping in penitence, in a few weeks. Their subculture has such a strong social bond that they don't hold out the way a few non-Amish people who have been shunned by their former social circle have done. Most non-Amish Americans who've been shunned on account of their opinions have, in fact, been able simply to move to the other side of the social aisle: before their relatives officially disowned them most Jews who've become Christians, Christians who've become Buddhists, Democrats who've become Republicans or vice versa, hawks who've become doves or vice versa, public school employees who've become advocates of school choice, psychiatrists who've recognized the dangers of Prozac Dementia, etc., have built up social networks on the other side and prepared themselves for the loss of some old relationships, even if the loss still hurts.

But what if all these people have in common is that they're clinging to profits...and the people who shun them are able to take those profits away? 

Gentle Readers, they are going to be sooo miserable. And they deserve it. And if anything can do them any good, our laughter at their tears is likely to be it. 

Enough farmers had naturally stopped using glyphosate, seeing that it made customers complain (and avoid their products) while it wasn't actually having much effect on the nastiest weeds, even by 2022 that even those of us whose bodies detect and react to glyphosate on the parts-per-billion level have been able to eat an almost balanced diet. All the rest of you have to do is shop and eat in solidarity with people like me to bring the Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate to their knees.

Will you miss a lot of foods you've always loved? I still do. I have found Mott's applesauce to be a safe food, although processing destroys the Vitamin C and I've not found a safe brand of fresh apples. (If you do eat apples, even if you live in Michigan and you traditionally bite into those peels, it's a good idea to peel apples thickly; the inner part of the fruit may be less damaged by glyphosate vapor drift.) I've found it safe to eat peeled oranges--but I like orange peel. I've not dared to eat any commercially grown green leafy vegetables. You have to raise your salads in your kitchen or back yard, and if you don't get a lot of sunshine your selection of salad greens may no longer include lettuce. I've not chosen to risk eating any kind of berries yet, either, because berries, cherries, and other fruits that don't have thick rinds just soak up glyphosate vapor drift like little sponges. So do carrots. So does celery. 

But I have been able to eat some oranges, pineapple, bananas, melon, even commercially grown peaches; some beans, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, peas, cucumbers, squashes, and lentils, in addition to onions, garlic, rice, and nuts. So should you be. Vitamin supplements aren't as good as food but should prevent deficiency diseases long enough to leave supermarkets and their suppliers sitting on a lot of alleged food nobody's buying. 

Let them cry. Let their families break up as they lose what they've made of their family farms. 

Don't wait on them in stores or restaurants. 

Block them on social media, in order to activate shadowbanning algorithms. If you happen to see a point that needs to be addressed in something they've said, address the point after blocking the Bitter Clinger. 

Walk out of religious services if they walk in. Without making your usual donation. 

Withhold membership dues from social clubs if the clubs don't drop Bitter Clingers from their membership.

Don't see Bitter Clingers as patients.

Don't trade with businesses that continue to employ them in any capacity.

Don't talk to the Bitter Clingers. That's all. Until they confess that they're not fit to own land and use their savings to compensate people who are willing to accept the financial loss involved in reclaiming the land they've poisoned. Repentance for actual physical deeds is not an emotional matter. Ignore the emotions until they've shown sincere repentance with more actual physical deeds.

All these people, or things that nature intended to have been people, care about is money so the effects of seeing their streams of income dry up should be valuable to other Bitter Clingers as examples. It's not absolutely necessary to laugh out loud in public when a Bitter Clinger commits suicide, as some of them will do, but it may be good for the other Bitter Clingers if we do.

I'm posting this after having had a sort of vision of an alternative future in which Bitter Clingers were allowed to roll on, in the way Trump and Kennedy seem to imagine they can be, and groups of their neighbors, armed with everything from machine guns to pitchforks, beat on their doors. In the group I was watching a Bitter Clinger came out to the door and tried to duck back inside. People beat on the door until the frame began to crack. The Bitter Clinger came out onto his porch. The crowd shouted, "Bring out your daughter," and a man stepped forward carrying a sack, unzipped the sack, and threw the dead body of a child right into the Bitter Clinger's face. The Bitter Clinger gasped, "No, not my daughter! Take me!" Then his wife was on the porch and the crowd shouted, "Take him back!" and threw a bleeding, broken body into her face. 

Justice denied tends to lead to violence and to further injustice.

Justice can be served, I believe, if enough people decide simply to stop speaking to the Bitter Clingers. Including "speech" on social media, or in the form of trade. 

Make the farmers themselves demand a ban on all open-air spraying of any chemical with a formula other than H2O, so that nobody will feel as much hated as they feel this summer.

Hurt their feelings so that nobody has to do more permanent damage to them.

Bad Poetry: Tearing Hate Down with Love

[Photo credit was lost because Google behaved badly.[

https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2025/11/friday-writings-203-why-i-love-hate.html

Let's all hate

glyphosate.

Tear it down.

In its place

love Queen Anne's Lace,

tall and proud and in your face.

Love milkweed

where butterflies feed.

Love pretty fluff

of dandelion puff.

Love a sharawaggi look;

let tall flowers form a shady nook

carpeted by violets and sheltered from the weather:

Can you get five colors of violets together?

Oh, so mean--

atrazine.

Tear it down.

Where it was

let the laws

of nature mandate kittens' paws

or ponies' feet

or lambs' faint bleat.

Love the children

and the beasts.

Love a fruit or flowering tree.

Bend your back and bend your knee

till every trace of Astroturf or of devil grass

is covered up by something native that was meant to last.

What a blot--

paraquat.

Tear it down.

Cry "begone!"

to the lawn

and the corporate greedheads' pawn.

Plant green peas,

strawberries.

Plant potatoes

or tomatoes.

Let green push away the pavement,

gardens push away enslavement

to the foolishness of zoning that, a hundred years ago,

said that from our homes to work needed twenty miles to go.

Save the Hellbenders

It was refreshing to find the Appalachian Voice in the mailbox recently; I don't think this small, partisan news magazine has been printed since the hurricane. In this summer's Voice was an article about an animal I've read about but never actually encountered. Since you readers have a high tolerance for biological gross-outs I thought you might like to learn more about the hellbender, Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, which most people never see even if they live near the animals' habitat.

Photo from Tn.gov. 

A hellbender is a sort of salamander. It's not as attractive as more common kinds of salamander. It has a large round head, is the color of clay mud, and can live for thirty years just growing bigger and uglier.  It's usually seen as similar in size and shape to a mudpuppy (it can grow bigger), but lacks the long gills at the back of the mudpuppy's head. Some old hellbenders weigh as much as five pounds, and measure up to 29 inches long; 16 inches long is more typical.

Hellbenders breathe oxygen underwater, through their skins as well as their faces. They can breathe on land but don't venture onto land if they can avoid it. As cold-blooded animals they need to stay where the temperature suits them, which, since they are adapted to function at a much colder body temperature than a warm-blooded animal's, is in deep water. When they swim up to where humans can see them they usually move fast back down to where the water feels good to them. 

Why is it called that? I've often wondered whether "hellbender" was one of those names, like "raccoon" and "skunk" and "possum," derived from an indigenous language. Apparently it's not. Early English immigrants, seeing the animal as some sort of unnatural cross between fish, snake, and lizard, thought it swam fast because it was "hell-bent" on returning to the underworld whence it came. It's also called "snot-otter," if you  prefer. It has no name that Victorians could utter in polite company because people didn't think the animal deserved to be discussed in polite company. Nicknames like "mud dog," "grampus," "den master," and "lasagna sides" are printable but not widely understood. If you want a name that sounds polite, try "cryptobranchid." There is only one species in the genus Cryptobranchus, but if there were others, the family name would be Cryptobranchidae.

Cryptobranchus means "hidden gills." These salamanders have visible gills when they first hatch, but in the second year of their lives the external gills drop off. For the rest of their lives they breathe through bare "gill slits" and absorb oxygen through their skin. 

So why does this animal inspire so much hate? Apparently just because it's big and ugly. It has sharp little teeth and can nip if grabbed; apart from occasional self-defense the animal is a harmless part of the food chain that indicates premium water quality. It stays in the water, eating small fishes and shellfish and doing humans no harm at all. It's not big enough to compete with us for fish big enough to be worth cooking. Though it seems as if it would be a predator on fish--it will eat chunks of killed fish--it's actually a prey animal for fish.

Hellbenders, like loons, can live only where the water is deeper, cleaner, colder, and richer in oxygen than most North American streams have ever been. They're not found in lakes, ponds, or branch creeks where children might wade. 

Their family lives take the concept of patriarchy beyond the wildest dreams of any patriarchal male mammal. Males scoop out nests on the bottoms of rivers. Nests are usually made under rocks or logs, sometimes in holes in riverbanks. Females are allowed in to lay eggs in the nests, where the males fertilize the eggs after they are laid and then defend them until they hatch. Females don't bond with males; they wriggle around together as males try to fertilize eggs as soon as they're laid, but don't have sex in the sense that most animals do. Both sexes are likely to choose another mate the next time. When each female who has mated with a male lays her little round eggs in the same nest, the male may wind up tending a thousand or more eggs, a few hundred from each female. Male hellbenders take their family responsibility very seriously--so much so that they may kill and eat other males who swim too close to their nests. (When not brooding, male hellbenders seem pretty peaceable.) The eggs are about a quarter-inch in diameter and take ten to twelve weeks to hatch. Then the inch-long hatchlings swim away on their own.

Larval hellbenders resemble other baby salamanders. They have noticeable gills for about a year and a half, while they grow to about four inches long, and then they lose the gills and look more like their parents. They breathe through gill slits and through their skins. They have internal structures that are classified as "simple lungs," which they use more for buoyancy than for breathing. A lateral frill of skin on each side, and folds of skin along the body, increase skin surface area and facilitate breathing. In a few more years, when they're six to eight years old and about a foot long, they become able to breed, but they never stop growing.

A baby hellbender with small ear-like gills. Photo from NCWildlife.gov.

They seem to be able to see fairly well in the light, but hunt and eat mostly at night. 

Photo from Wikipedia. Four toes on each fore paw, five on each hind paw.

Appalachian and Ozark hellbenders are different subspecies, but can crossbreed, so they're counted as one species. 

Males and females look alike and are similar in size. Males are more aggressive; they herd gravid females into their nests and keep them there until the females lay their eggs. Females have nothing to do but hide from predators, eat, and wait to grow more eggs and mate again, so they tend to be the individuals who live longest and grow biggest.

There are believed to have been 626 populations of this species. About 40% of those populations have died out. A majority of known surviving populations seem to be declining. States where this animal has been found classify it as "threatened" or "of concerned," and some people lobby for it to be classified as "endangered." 

Threats to the species' existence include

• pollution
• de-oxygenation of river water from pollution, silt, and dams
• loss of river depth as streams silt up, a natural process aggravated by human activities such as ploughing and construction
• anglers catching and killing the animals in the belief that they eat fish and/or are venomous
• fungus and virus infections
• cannibalism when the protective fathers believe the young cannot survive, when an egg seems to be non-viable or when the water becomes muddy

They are a species that nature always intended to remain rare. Populations of hellbenders thin themselves by cannibalism if there is the least chance of overcrowding. 

These unappealing animals caught the Voice reporters' attention when dead bodies of a species many local people had never seen turned up in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Many home-loving hellbenders were washed away from their homes to succumb to what they experienced as heat strokes on the mounds of silt and mud displaced by flooding. Though North Carolina's hellbender population was estimated by ones before the hurricane and obviously decimated after the hurricane, living hellbenders have survived and still live in the affected rivers.

Though most people living in the States where they live never have seen a living hellbender and never will, there are things they can do to help this species survive:

1. Preserve stream and river banks, even along shallow branch creeks. Reduce the rate of silt transfer by encouraging large wildflowers, reeds and rushes, and trees where possible, to grow on steep, near-vertical stream banks. 

2. Stop spraying poisons in the outdoor environment. (Poisoning termites inside a building is less likely to affect wildlife.) "Pesticides" kill more valuable wildlife than pests.

3. Try planting crops in mounds of mulch, straw bales, etc., which can even be terraced along hillsides that are too steep to plough, instead of ploughing up topsoil. Mountain people prize "bottom land" that lies at or below the level of the nearest stream because topsoil does not run off every time it rains, and "bottom land" fields are the only ones my family have ploughed since about 1980, but even "bottom land" can still be built up and fertilized with organic mulch.

4. Don't support new construction projects near streams. Especially oppose mining, which adds pollution to the silt it displaces, and large "housing projects" that increase population density and local warming. True Greens already oppose "fracking" and nuclear experiments; hellbenders are just one more species that benefits when humans don't engage in these harmful activities.

5. If you inadvertently catch a hellbender while angling for bass or trawling for catfish, throw it back alive. Handle (or avoid handling) this animal carefully but without fear; it's no more dangerous than a fish of the same size.

Status Update: Excursion with Ruminations

I went into town yesterday. This has become a rare occurrence rather than a daily commute. I hate to say it but I was in better condition when it was a daily commute; ninety-degree heat shouldn't bother me...

Ninety-degree heat, yes. At the Cat Sanctuary the sun beating down on the metal roof had raised the temperature on my front porch from about 75 to a little over 80 degrees Fahrenheit when I walked out the door. Not a mile further along, once I'd reached the paved highway, the dashboard thermometer of the person who offered a lift was reading 93 in the sun, 92 when the car passed through shade--and this I could believe. It was a lot hotter near the pavement than it was up on the hill, among the trees.

Local climate change is well distributed around the world but it is not global climate change. The temperature changes we're seeing are far beyond even the most alarming indicators of potential global climate change (which could happen, but I'm not likely to be here long enough to know whether it ever does). They are also very local.

I happened to be near a television set that was broadcasting the local weather news and forecast. The local weather news showed absolutely typical July weather, the weather of my childhood and, according to them, my grandparents' childhood, in the smaller towns surrounding Kingsport and Bristol: temperatures around 70, even lower at higher elevations overnight, rising up to 80 or 85 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime. For Kingsport's weather station, which is still closer to the river than to the streets where Kingsporters actually live, overnight lows were in the 80s, the afternoon high at the weather station would be about 90, and the 90% humidity would make it feel more like 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Ten-degree difference. (Before the overpavement along Stone Drive, it was two or three degrees. Before the slum was built, it was five or six degrees.) Now remember that in Gate City I'd seen a ten-degree difference between my home, which is basically an orchard, and the paved highway. In Kingsport, around the slum, the actual temperature probably was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The forecast was that it's going to be like this for at least another week.

While walking along Route 23 above Gate City, I heard sirens. Not enough sirens for a fire or police call. Only one vehicle was using only one siren, only intermittently. So someone was being taken to the hospital. Likely that would be some older person, out of condition, who'd pushed perself to work outside in the heat. 

I walked very, very slowly in the 93-degree heat. Well, I walked at the pace I usually use around the house, not hurrying, not dawdling, in between patches of shade, where I sat down and rested while the wind off the passing traffic dried off the sweat. I managed to get into town with unsoaked clothing. 

You get a choice, Gentle Readers. How deadly hot do you want summers to be? If you don't want your local summers to be hotter, let trees replace some of the existing construction and paving in your neighborhood. If you want to cash in on anybody's greedhead ideas about "housing," buckle up and brace for longer, hotter summers than you've ever survived before.

That television set was braying about a "need," not in Kingsport but further into Tennessee, for labor in a new quarrying project that was apparently an unwelcome surprise to local people. It was anticipated that people willing to work on this project would not be local and would not want to live in the neighborhood they were about to make ugly. During about an hour of television exposure I heard two commercial ads from different real estate speculators, and the talking head at the news department obligingly repeated and explained a line from the advertisement. Tennessee landowners could legally keep their houses while renting out their land to people who would use the land to build new "housing."

Y'all don't think your summers are hot enough already, in Tennessee? 

Even in Virginia it feels to me as if doing anything useful in this weather really requires gills. I want nothing to do with "housing." If people can't live in (or renovate) existing houses that become available when people die and their heirs want to be somewhere else, that may be an indication that nature intended those people not to move into my town.

I will hear no idiocies about this having anything to do with what people look like. I don't expect to spend enough time looking at them to care if their skins are fluorescent green and they have spiral fluorescent horns instead of fingernails. (Well, if they were that unusual-looking I might at least feel curious about whether they were actors making a movie about space aliens or young people trying to start a kicky rebellious fad that would differ noticeably from any older one. 

It's about how many people need to live in one place, and whether they can walk on gravel paths or think they need pavement and cars, and whether they can raise their own food in a sustainable way (not spraying, but eating, the "weeds"), and whether they can run a neighborhood biomass burner on waste without killing any trees or dumping any sewage in any condition into rivers, and whether they appreciate large farms as natural habitats for large extended families or want to ruin them with "housing" projects, i.e. slums.

Reversing the kind of climate change we can all see and feel and agree on does not require a global dictatorship at all. It requires local self-governing communities to say no to any proposed construction of new "apartment" or "town house" or "row house" buildings, to say that even temporary laborers deserve houses where each person has a room of per own and at least a plot of kitchen garden.

Morgan Griffith on Preventing Blackouts

Editorial comment: This is timely. I think yesterday was the second day this year I've thought the office could benefit from the Lasko fan. (Your local hardware store probably has a crop of new window-type fans in search of loving homes.) We in the Point of Virginia have enjoyed three months with very little need for climate control.

(Last week's refrigerator-like nighttime temperatures...I thought, "Don't touch that hot-air fan. Put on your tabard," at myself. Then I considered the baby kitten in the office, and touched that hot-air fan.)

We have those "older" power plants, "old" as in, what, ten years? Fifteen? Do we need to keep replacing things every ten years, or do we need to build them better the first time? We do need to keep them working; don't need people dying of heat exhaustion in their fully electric climate-controlled apartments in the local warming zones in the Hump and the Swamp. 

But, fellow Virginians, we've got plenty of sunshine going to waste. We've got literally tons of biomass and all we're doing with it is dumping it, maybe with a pool chlorine tablet tossed in here and there, into the Tennessee River where our neighbor State gets most of its drinking water. Most of our homes and all of our towns could be producing renewable energy, without relying on hazardous resources like nuclear plants, or on stripping or deep-mining what's left of our coal. Why are we not doing this? Why are APCo, PEPCo, and Dominion not being more proactive in wiring our southwest-facing roofs to be clean energy producers? 

The Ninth District is the home of many people who are retired, disabled, just plain poor, or under the impression that we've become a culture that encourages welfare-cheating. Making assumptions about what the lardbuckets ahead of us in the checkout line are buying, or why, or what they ought to be buying or doing instead, is not likely to help. Demanding that some of our biggest and most directly interested corporations stop enabling the welfare cheats with handout programs, and start empowering all of us to collect payment for what we have to offer to the rest of Virginia, is what we need to be doing.

My home could very easily be generating five times as much electricity as I consume, even in winter. So could some of yours. Please let Congressman Griffith know that these companies don't need insurance for high-risk deep mining and nuclear power schemes; they need to focus on the transition the Point of Virginia should be making, right now, from consumption to production of electricity. Yes, new energy sources need to be regulated. Yes, companies need to know that they'll be monitored to ensure that community biomass burners are burning primarily sewage, a little landfill-type waste, occasional prunings, but no trees. Yes, companies need to know that the solar collectors in which they're investing must come with adequate gutters and filters to keep batteries from eroding into the water supply. That is what Congress is for. We need no shortsighted grabs at the short-term cash infusion, and long-term risks to life, presented by that "small nuclear reactor" some fools have babbled about putting in Wise County. We need intelligent investment in Wise County, and in Scott, Lee, Buchanan, and the other counties in the Ninth District. Do we need it now? We needed it years ago. 

Our entire Congress need to take a firm line with the corporations. NO talk about nuclear plants, about deepening mines, or about strip mining, until we're fully optimized for solar energy production and until our river water is entering Tennessee (or the Chesapeake Bay) 100% sewage-free.

From US Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9:

"

Many families have prepared for the return of summer.

Plans include pool parties, barbecues and vacations.

Some plans will account for summer heat. Air conditioning and other tools will be increasingly used to keep homes cool.

This increased electricity demand means that our electric grid will be under greater stress.

We are already hearing of potential breaking points this summer in our electric grid.

The Friday before Memorial Day, Energy Secretary Wright issued an emergency order directing the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) to ensure a coal-fired power plant in Michigan remained operational.

Wright issued the order to minimize the risk of blackouts ahead of the high electricity demand expected.

New Orleans is part of MISO, a regional grid operator that provides transmission service to all or part of 15 U.S. states as well as Manitoba, Canada.

Notwithstanding keeping the plant open, the New Orleans metro area suffered a large and unexpected power outage during Memorial Day weekend. At the blackout’s peak, more than 100,000 customers lost electricity.

According to news website Axios, utilities were aware of the strain on the grid for at least 48 hours before the disruption.

Reports confirmed that two of the region’s nuclear power plants lost connection to the grid. One was due to expected maintenance, the other was unexpected. Constrained by a lack of energy supply, grid operators cut power to customers in New Orleans.

Entergy, an electric utility company in the region, said that the forced outages directed by MISO were done to prevent a larger scale and more prolonged power outage from impacting the electric grid.

This blackout was not the only major power outage in recent memory.

On April 28, Portugal and Spain witnessed the worst blackout in their history, affecting 55 million people, per British newspaper The Guardian.

Airports were shut down, cars drove on streets without traffic lights, hospitals resorted to backup generators and some people were stuck in elevators!

While the Iberian Peninsula blackout continues to be investigated, it is interesting to note that on April 16, Spain reported its first weekday where its national power grid was 100% reliant on renewable power.

A coincidence? Maybe, maybe not!

Coincidentally, in a recent Virginia Tech press release, professor and Power and Energy Center director Dr. Ali Mehrizi-Sani highlighted how the systems that control these clean energy sources are more susceptible to blackouts.

As parts of the world transition to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the lack of seamless grid adaptation to the use of these sources, as illustrated by the blackout in Spain and Portugal and by experts like Dr. Mehrizi-Sani, threatens destabilization of electric grids and more blackouts.

For years in Congress, I actively warned about the threats posed by leftist policies that attempted to gut our grid’s reliance on fossil fuels and convert to renewables.

Federal policies, like the Obama-era “War on Coal” and the Biden Administration’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), shunning reliable baseload forms of energy like coal and natural gas have made our electric grid more vulnerable to failure.  

California’s reliance on renewables continues to subject residents to rolling brownouts. California has since, seemingly, mitigated the issue, but accordingly has one of the highest electricity rates in the country.

In 2013, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced plans to close eight coal-fired power units, citing a flat demand for power.

They have already closed five, but have opened several natural gas power plants.

TVA customers have experienced rolling brownouts as energy demand increases.

I have already introduced a bill this year to help improve our electric grid.

H.R. 3632, the Power Plant Reliability Act of 2025, allows states and regional grid operators to delay proposed closures of baseload power plants forced on them by state or federal mandates and regulations until a reliability solution is implemented.

This bill was passed by the House Energy Subcommittee on June 5.

There are also elements of the House reconciliation bill that support our electric grid. 

In the House bill, we curtail some IRA tax credits, which disincentivize coal and natural gas power plants. We kept the incentives for nuclear because of its significant potential for baseload power.

We also create an energy project insurance pool to help protect energy investors from permits being revoked for coal, oil, critical minerals, natural gas or nuclear installations.

This de-risking compensation fund will make it harder for federal policies to discourage and phase out these reliable sources of energy.

I will continue advocating for reliable energy solutions that secure America’s electric power grid!

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.

"